A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain

A COMPANION TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Edited by

H. T. Dickinson

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain

A COMPANION TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Edited by

H. T. Dickinson

© 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd a Blackwell Publishing company 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA 108 Cowely Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia Kurfürstendamm 57, 10707 Berlin, Germany The right of H. T. Dickinson to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to eighteenth-century Britain / edited by H. T. Dickinson. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to British history) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-631-21837-8 1. Great Britain – History – 18th century – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Great Britain – Civilization – 18th century – Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Dickinson, H. T. II. Series. DA480 .C58 2002 941.07 – dc21 2002022769 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12 pt Galliard by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO BRITISH HISTORY

Published in association with The Historical Association

This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our current understanding of British History. Each volume comprises up to forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The aim of each contribution is to synthesize the current state of scholarship from a variety of historical perspectives and to provide a statement on where the field is heading. The essays are written in a clear, provocative and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students and general readers. The Blackwell Companions to British History is a comerstone of Blackwell’s overarching Companions to History series, covering European, American and World History. Published A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages Edited by S. H. Rigby A Companion to Stuart Britain Edited by Barry Coward A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain Edited by H. T. Dickinson A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain Edited by Chris Wrigley In preparation A Companion to Roman Britain Edited by Malcolm Todd A Companion to Britain in the Early Middle Ages Edited by Pauline Stafford A Companion to Tudor Britain Edited by Robert Tittler and Norman Jones A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain Edited by Chris Williams A Companion to Contemporary Britain Edited by Paul Addison and Harriet Jones The Historical Association is the voice for history. Since 1906 it has been bringing together people who share an interest in, and love for, the past. It aims to further the study of teaching of history at all levels. Membership is open to everyone: teacher and student, amateur and professional. Membership offers a range of journals, activities and other benefits. Full details are available from The Historical Association, 59a Kennington Park Road, London SE11 4JH, [email protected], www.history.org.uk.

Other Blackwell History Companions include: BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY Published A Companion to Western Historical Thought Edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza In preparation A Companion to Gender History Edited by Teresa Meade and Merry E. Weisner-Hanks BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO EUROPEAN HISTORY Published A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance Edited by Guido Ruggiero In preparation A Companion to the Reformation World Edited by R. Po-chia Hsia A Companion to Europe Since 1945 Edited by Klaus Larres A Companion to Europe 1900–1945 Edited by Gordon Martel BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY Published A Companion to the American Revolution Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole A Companion to 19th-Century America Edited by William L. Barney A Companion to the American South Edited by John B. Boles A Companion to American Indian History Edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury A Companion to American Women’s History Edited by Nancy A. Hewitt A Companion to Post-1945 America Edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig A Companion to the Vietnam War Edited by Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco In preparation A Companion to Colonial America Edited by Daniel Vickers A Companion to 20th-Century America Edited by Stephen J. Whitfield A Companion to the American West Edited by William Deverell A Companion to American Foreign Relations Edited by Robert Schulzinger BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO WORLD HISTORY In preparation A Companion to the History of Africa Edited by Joseph Miller A Companion to the History of the Middle East Edited by Youssef M. Choueiri

Contents

List of Maps

x

List of Contributors

xi

Introduction

xv

Maps

xix

Part I Politics and the Constitution 1 The British Constitution H. T. Dickinson

1 3

2 The British State Eckhart Hellmuth

19

3 Finance and Taxation Patrick Karl O’Brien

30

4 Local Government and Local Society David Eastwood

40

5 Parliament, Parties and Elections (1688–1760) Brian Hill

55

6 Parliament, Parties and Elections (1760–1815) Stephen M. Lee

69

7 The Jacobite Movement Daniel Szechi

81

8 Popular Politics and Radical Ideas H. T. Dickinson

97

9 The Crisis of the French Revolution Emma Vincent Macleod

112

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contents

Part II The Economy and Society

125

10 Manufacturing and Commerce John Rule

127

11 Agriculture and Rural Life Gordon Mingay

141

12 The Landed Elite Richard G. Wilson

158

13 The Middling Orders Nicholas Rogers

172

14 The Labouring Poor John Rule

183

15 Urban Life and Culture Peter Borsay

196

16 Women and the Family John D. Ramsbottom

209

Part III Religion

223

17 The Church of England Jeremy Gregory

225

18 Religious Minorities in England Colin Haydon

241

19 Methodism and the Evangelical Revival G. M. Ditchfield

252

20 Religion in Scotland Stewart J. Brown

260

21 Religion in Ireland Sean J. Connolly

271

Part IV Culture

281

22 Print Culture Bob Harris

283

23 Political Ideas from Locke to Paine Pamela Edwards

294

24 The Making of Elite Culture Maura A. Henry

311

25 Literature and Drama J. Alan Downie

329

contents

ix

26 Popular Culture Bob Bushaway

344

27 Crime and Punishment James A. Sharpe

358

Part V Union and Disunion in the British Isles

367

28 Integration: Patriotism and Nationalism Colin Kidd

369

29 Scotland and the Union Alexander Murdoch

381

30 Wales in the Eighteenth Century Geraint H. Jenkins

392

31 Ireland: The Making of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’, 1690–1760 Paddy McNally

403

32 Ireland: Radicalism, Rebellion and Union Martyn J. Powell

414

Part VI Britain and the Wider World

429

33 Britain’s Emergence as a European Power, 1688–1815 H. M. Scott

431

34 Britain and the Atlantic World W. A. Speck

447

35 Britain and India Bruce P. Lenman

460

36 The British Army Stanley D. M. Carpenter

473

37 The Royal Navy Richard Harding

481

38 Britain and the Slave Trade John Oldfield

489

Bibliography

499

Index

516

List of Maps

Map Map Map Map Map Map Map Map Map Map

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The counties of England and Wales in the eighteenth century Parliamentary constituencies in Scotland, 1707–1832 Ireland in the eighteenth century Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1700 Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1750 Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1801 British North America c.1763 The Caribbean in the eighteenth century Europe c.1775 Expansion of British power in India

xx xxi xxii xxiii xxiv xxv xxvi xxvii xxviii xxx

Contributors

Peter Borsay was educated at Lancaster University and is at present Professor of History at the University of Wales, Lampeter. His publications include The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 and The Image of Georgian Bath 1700–2000: Towns, Heritage and History. Stewart J. Brown took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland and The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–1846. Bob Bushaway gained his first degree and his doctorate from the University of Southampton. He is currently Director of Research Support and Business Development of the University of Birmingham and an associate member of the History department there. He is the author of By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 and of essays in books and journals. Stanley D. M. Carpenter has higher degrees from the University of St Andrews and Florida State University, Tallahassee. He is now an Associate Professor at the United States Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. He has contributed articles

to various encyclopaedias and historical dictionaries. Sean J. Connolly was educated at University College, Dublin and the University of Ulster. He is currently Professor of Irish History at the Queen’s University, Belfast. His publications include Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760, Priests and People in PreFamine Ireland 1780–1845 and, as general editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish History. H. T. Dickinson has degrees from Durham, Newcastle and Edinburgh universities and has been Richard Lodge Professor of British History at Edinburgh since 1980. His publications include Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in EighteenthCentury Britain and The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain. G. M. Ditchfield was educated at Cambridge University and is now Reader in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is the author of The Evangelical Revival and co-editor of British Parliamentary Lists 1660–1800. J. Alan Downie was educated at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is currently Senior Pro-Warden (Academic) and Professor of English at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. His publications include Robert Harley and the Press:

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Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe and Jonathan Swift: Political Writer. David Eastwood was educated at Oxford University and taught there before becoming Professor of History at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is currently Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. His publications include Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in English Local Government, 1780–1840 and Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700– 1870. Pamela Edwards gained her Ph.D. at the University of London and teaches at Richmond University in London. She is currently a visiting fellow in the History department at Yale University. She has published learned articles in the History of Political Thought and Enlightenment and Dissent, and is revising her book on the political thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Jeremy Gregory was educated at Oxford University. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. His publications include Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese and, as co-author, The Longman Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1820. Richard Harding graduated from Leicester University and took his Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is currently Professor of Organizational History at the University of Westminster. His publications include Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century and Seapower and Naval Warfare 1650–1830. Bob Harris was educated at Durham and Oxford universities. He is currently Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Dundee. His publications include A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s and Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Colin Haydon was educated at Oxford University and is now Reader in History

at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. His publications include Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–80 and (edited with John Walsh and Stephen Taylor) The Church of England, c.1689– c.1833. Eckhart Hellmuth gained his doctorate and his habilitation at the University of Trier. He is currently Professor of Modern History at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. His publications include Naturrechtsphilosophie und bürokratischer Werthorizont and (as editor) The Transformation of Political Culture in England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century. Maura A. Henry studied for a time at the University of Sussex and graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. Having gained her doctorate at Harvard University she has held a number of posts there, including Lecturer in History and Women’s Studies and Assistant Director of Women’s Studies. Brian Hill gained his doctorate at Cambridge University and taught for many years at the University of East Anglia, where he retired as Reader in History. His publications include The Growth of Parliamentary Parties 1689–1742 and British Parliamentary Parties 1742–1832. Geraint H. Jenkins was educated at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is currently Professor of Welsh History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Director of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. His publications include The Foundation of Modern Wales 1642–1780 and Literature, Religion and Society in Wales 1660–1730. He is also general editor of A Social History of the Welsh Language. Colin Kidd studied at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford universities and is now Reader in History at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Subverting Scotland’s Past and British Identities before Nationalism. Stephen M. Lee is a graduate of Edinburgh University and gained his doctorate at Manchester University. He now teaches at Torquay Boys’ Grammar School. He has published articles on aspects of the career

contributors of George Canning and is working on a study of Canning and liberal Toryism. Bruce P. Lenman is a graduate of Aberdeen and has two graduate degrees from Cambridge University. He is currently a Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. His many publications include England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688 and Britain’s Colonial Wars 1688–1783. Emma Vincent Macleod was educated at Edinburgh University and is now a Lecturer in History at the University of Stirling. She is the author of A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802. Paddy McNally was educated at Queen’s University, Belfast and is currently Senior Lecturer in History at University College, Worcester. His publications include Parties, Patriots and Undertakers: Parliamentary Politics in Early Hanoverian Ireland. Gordon Mingay was educated at Nottingham University. He is now retired, but his last appointment was as Professor of Agrarian History at the University of Kent. Among his many publications are two large-scale edited works: The Victorian Countryside (2 vols) and The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 6: 1750–1850. Alexander Murdoch was educated at George Washington University and the University of Edinburgh and is now Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the latter university. His publications include ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in MidEighteenth-Century Scotland and British History 1660–1832: National Identity and Local Culture. Patrick Karl O’Brien was educated and taught at the University of Oxford before becoming Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. He is currently Centennial Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. His many publications include Revolution in Egypt’s Economic System: From Private Enterprise to Socialism, 1952–1965 and (with Cagler Keyder) Economic Growth in Britain and

xiii

France, 1780–1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century. John Oldfield was educated at Cambridge University and is at present Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. His publications include Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 and Civilization and Black Progress: Selected Writings of Alexander Crummell on the South. Martyn J. Powell gained his first degree and his doctorate at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he is at present a Lecturer in History. He has published several articles on British and Irish politics in the later eighteenth century and is completing a study on Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire. John D. Ramsbottom was awarded his Ph.D. by Yale University and is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has published articles in learned journals on the Restoration Church of England. Nicholas Rogers was educated at Oxford and Toronto universities. He is at present a Professor of History at York University, Toronto. His publications include Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt and Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain. John Rule was educated at Cambridge and Warwick universities and is currently a Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. His publications include Albion’s People: English Society 1714–1815 and The Vital Century: England’s Developing Economy. H. M. Scott was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics. He is currently Professor of International History at the University of St Andrews. His many publications include British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution and The Emergence of the Eastern Powers. James A. Sharpe gained his doctorate at Oxford University. He is currently a Professor of History at the University of York. His publications include Crime in Early

xiv

contributors

Modern England 1550–1750 and Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. W. A. Speck was educated at Oxford University. He was a Professor of History at Hull and Leeds universities. He is now an emeritus Professor of History of the University of Leeds and at present a visiting professor at the University of Northumbria (Carlisle campus). Among his many publications are Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies 1701–1715 and Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760. Daniel Szechi graduated from Sheffield University and gained his doctorate at Oxford

University. He is at present Professor of History at Auburn University, Alabama. His publications include The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 and George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1689–1727: A Study in Jacobitism. Richard G. Wilson gained his doctorate at Leeds University and is now Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of East Anglia. His publications include (with T. R. Gourvish) The British Brewing Industry, 1830–1980 and (with Alan Mackley) Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1880.

Introduction H. T. Dickinson

Fifty years ago historians studying eighteenth-century Britain would probably have agreed on what were its most important features. These historians stressed the aristocratic nature and characteristics of Britain, with a long-established landed elite dominating politics and society. They would have emphasized widespread support for a limited monarchy and have highlighted the prestige of a parliament dominated by the landed elite, but they would also have stressed that government and parliament did little to interfere with the lives of most British subjects. They would have acknowledged the importance of agriculture, but would have recognized the growing wealth of the country based on commercial and industrial improvements. They would have praised Britain as an enlightened, modernizing society, becoming increasingly urbanized, secularized and tolerant. They would have celebrated the military, naval and imperial successes which Britain gained in her long rivalry with France, with but a passing nod to the failure in the War of American Independence. Aristocracy, stability, improvement and growing prosperity would have been regarded as the principal features of eighteenth-century Britain. Today, historians of eighteenth-century Britain are much more sharply divided over what they regard as its central features. There are those who see Britain as very like the anciens régimes of continental Europe, dominated by monarchy, religion and the aristocratic elite. There are those who see Britain as significant because of those political, financial, economic, social and cultural changes which were making her the most dynamic and modern society in Europe, indeed in the world. There are those historians who stress stability and cohesion in eighteenth-century Britain, and those who emphasize almost constant instability and the continual tension between the traditional forces of order and the abiding threat to these forces at home and abroad. There are those historians who still stress the significance of the major political and economic developments in eighteenth-century Britain, and those who believe that the most interesting features of Britain are its intellectual, social and cultural developments. Religion has been restored to a central position in British life in the eighteenth century and there is now much interest in intellectual discourse, in the role of gender and of women, and in crime and disorder. Whatever their particular

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research interests, all historians now agree that eighteenth-century Britain was a vibrant, multi-faceted and multi-layered society that cannot be understood without making an effort to examine the old and the new, the traditional and the dynamic, the changes and the continuities. This Companion, produced jointly by a range of experts drawn from several countries, endeavours to explain to the student and the intelligent lay reader what were the most important developments in eighteenth-century Britain that have made her such a fascinating subject for serious historical inquiry. It is not an encyclopaedia, so it does not seek to present a comprehensive coverage, in short compass, of all aspects of eighteenth-century Britain. Instead, it covers in greater detail a wide range of important topics which will provide the reader with a sound understanding of many of the most important features of eighteenth-century Britain as they are now being investigated and understood by leading historians in these fields. The essays in this Companion on politics and the constitution deliberately seek to do justice to the old and the new. They show how much remained unchanged during the long eighteenth century from 1688 to 1815: the importance of the monarch and the strength of crown influence; the domination of parliament by the aristocratic, landed elite; the importance of patronage and influence over election results; the survival of ancient institutions of local government; and the predominance of rather conservative political views among the propertied elite. On the other hand, these essays also show: that the sovereignty of crown-in-parliament became increasingly assured; that, for the first time in its history, parliament met every year after 1689; how political parties rose, declined and began to rise again; and how both central and local government were not entirely dominated by a narrow landed elite, but could be influenced by large numbers of people. Moreover, while Britons enjoyed the rule of law and greater liberties than before, and while Britain became the most efficient fiscal-military state in Europe and developed a particularly effective finance and taxation system, the political system and the ruling elite were seriously challenged at different stages during the century by Jacobite and American rebels, by French revolutionaries, and by domestic radicals. In economic and social spheres the essays here acknowledge that Britain was primarily a rural country and an agrarian economy, and a hierarchical and patriarchal society, in which a narrow landed elite exercised very considerable power and the majority of the population paid due deference to their economic and social superiors. The peerage remained an exclusive elite which retained wealth, status and power across the whole eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. The landed gentry also retained and expanded their influence, though they were more open to infiltration by newcomers who gained wealth by other means than the ownership of land. The essays here make it clear that land was not the sole source of wealth, status and power. Over the century parts of Britain at least were gradually being transformed into a modern, urban, commercial and then industrial society. Although many historians now eschew such terms as the ‘industrial revolution’ and the ‘agricultural revolution’, because technological change and economic growth and output were simply not that rapid in the eighteenth century to justify these terms, there is no denying that the British economy was advancing on many fronts in a manner and at a rate that made Britain a far more prosperous country and a more advanced economy by the end of the century than she had been at the beginning. These cumulative

introduction

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developments ultimately had a significant effect on British society, creating in particular a more powerful urban middle class, in terms of wealth, status and even power, at least at the local level if not yet at the political centre. It was not only middle-class males, however, who were affected by economic and social changes; both the poor and women of all classes began to escape from those economic fetters and social chains that had previously bound them and still bound a higher proportion of the subjects of other European states. Contributors to this Companion clearly recognize the fruits of recent scholarship that have stressed the powerful influence of religion in general on eighteenth-century Britain and the significant spiritual, moral and political role of the Church of England in particular. They appreciate that Britain was not so secularized as historians once claimed and that the Church of England was not so politicized as once was thought. On the other hand, they also demonstrate that Britain was more pluralistic and tolerant in religion than most European states. Protestant Dissenters remained a force to be reckoned with throughout the eighteenth century, and Methodists became a rising force in the late eighteenth century. Scotland retained her own distinctive established church after the Union of 1707, but it too faced competition from other sects and churches. In Ireland Protestant Dissent was a major influence in Ulster and in the other provinces the majority of the population remained Catholic. The Catholic question and sectarian divisions bedevilled internal relations on that island and undoubtedly soured relations with Great Britain. There is now widespread interest in cultural history. There are essays in this Companion that show how eighteenth-century Britain became both highly admired by educated people across Europe and increasingly divided at home between its elite, bourgeois and popular cultures. The landed elite developed an impressively cohesive culture that enabled it to maintain its dominant political and social position. The middling orders in society sometimes sought to ape that culture, but in urban areas an enlightened culture arose which was both distinct from and also intersected with the elite culture of the landed classes. The people at large, in both urban and rural Britain, retained a wide range of cultural practices and traditions, which were distinct from those of their social superiors and which sometimes brought them into conflict with the governing elite. Eighteenth-century Britain developed a popular press which educated, influenced and informed a higher proportion of the population than ever before – and far more of the non-elite than in any other European state. Such a free and active press allowed a wide range of political ideas to be more intensely debated in Britain than in any European state prior to the French Revolution of 1789. Britain’s free press and capacity for open political debate were much admired by enlightened opinion in Europe. Her literature and drama were also deeply admired in Europe as Britain escaped to some extent from the cultural hegemony of France. Satiric verse, comedy dramas, and especially the periodic essay and the novel had a profound impact both throughout the British Isles and far beyond their shores. The study of crime and punishment has also become a growth area in British historical studies since the 1970s. This research has demonstrated that the eighteenth-century criminal justice system was neither as brutal nor as chaotic as earlier generations of historians had claimed. It also shows how Britain became one of the first countries to experience the growth of urban and commercial crime, and sought to develop new methods of policing urban areas and punishing those guilty of such crimes.

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Abroad, the essays here explain how Britain became a major European power for the first time for centuries and how she felt compelled to wage another ‘Hundred Years’ War’ against France. They also explain the strengths, particular qualities and specific weaknesses of the army and navy, which were so essential to the growth of British power and her remarkable imperial expansion. In the eighteenth century Britain could reasonably claim to be the most liberal country in Europe, and certainly many Britons were enormously proud of their ‘liberties’, and yet Britain also came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade and to govern large numbers of non-European subjects across the world. These achievements brought resentment and even resistance, as well as political and economic benefits. Without clear government planning or a decided imperial strategy, Britain acquired a large empire across the Atlantic, stretching from Hudson Bay to Trinidad. In the later eighteenth century British ministers drifted into a political crisis with British subjects on the mainland of North America and failed to avoid a disastrous war which resulted in Britain losing these valuable American colonies. This apparent calamity did not, however, have quite the devastating effect on British prestige and power that many contemporaries feared. This was, in part, because Britain remained by far the greatest commercial partner of the new United States and, in part, because Britain began to acquire another, very different, empire in India. Britain’s successes and endeavours in wars in Europe and across the world are shown to owe much to her economic power, her financial strength, her rather old-fashioned but vastly augmented army, and her more professional and effective navy. While her successes may have been built on an army, navy and financial system that were not radically different from what they had been at the end of the seventeenth century, they did dramatically alter Britain’s position relative to the other major European powers. Britain in 1815 was a formidable power, a far stronger and much more important state than she had been in 1688. Finally, the essays here take up a recent subject of much historical enquiry: to what extent was there a unified and coherent British state as distinct from a collection of different countries within the British Isles that were increasingly brought under the political sway of England? The contributors to this section of the Companion all seek to show what was distinctive about Scotland, Wales and Ireland, how far different communities flourished across the British Isles, and to what extent they were fully incorporated with England into a greater and more integrated ‘British’ state. They demonstrate that many different societies and distinct communities continued to flourish across the British Isles throughout the eighteenth century, despite efforts from Westminster in particular to achieve greater political integration. While major strides were made towards the political integration of the various parts of Great Britain, some of those most distant from London were not fully ‘Anglicized’ (or even English-speaking) by the end of the century. Throughout the century Ireland remained a particular problem and it exploded in rebellion in 1798. The Act of Union in 1800, and the creation of the United Kingdom from 1 January 1801, was an effort to solve this problem and to make all inhabitants of the British Isles into ‘Britons’, but it ultimately foundered on the rocks of religious, social and economic divisions.

Maps

Counties of Wales A Anglesey B Caernarfonshire C Denbighshire D Flintshire E Merioneth F Montgomeryshire G Cardiganshire H Radnorshire I Brecknockshire J Pembrokeshire K Carmarthenshire L Glamorganshire M Monmouthshire (technically an English county)

0

50 miles

0

80 km

1

‘Ridings of Yorkshire – West, North and East’

2

5 4

3 6 3

A 7

D

C

B

10

9

8 12

E F

15

14

13

11

20 18

H

G

19

17

J

I

K

25 24 M

L

21

31

26

27

38

36

28

32 33

29

22

23

16

34 39

37

35 Counties of England 1 Northumberland 2 Cumberland 3 Lancashire 4 Westmorland 5 Durham 6 Yorkshire 7 Cheshire 8 Derbyshire 9 Nottinghamshire 10 Lincolnshire 11 Shropshire 12 Staffordshire 13 Leicestershire

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Rutland Norfolk Herefordshire Worcestershire Warwickshire Northamptonshire Huntingdonshire Cambridgeshire Suffolk Bedfordshire Gloucestershire Oxfordshire Buckinghamshire

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Hertfordshire Essex Somerset Wiltshire Berkshire Middlesex Surrey Kent Cornwall Devon Dorset Hampshire Sussex

Map 1 The counties of England and Wales in the eighteenth century (adapted from Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy, London, 1993).

Group of burghs with name of group. Edinburgh returned one MP for its group and one MP itself

21

Wick 6a

29 8

25 8a

Inverness

Elgin 12 4 1

16 17 14 2

Montrose

23 St Andrews Stirling 9 24

13

Kirkcaldy Leith Haddington 20 15 Glasgow 11 Edinburgh 5 19 22

28

6 Kilmarnock

7

7a

Falkirk

Ayr 3

27 26 10

Note: Counties with the same number took turns electing an MP before 1832

30

1 2 3 4 5 6 6a

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Aberdeen Argyll Ayr Banff Berwick Bute Caithness

7 7a 8 8a 9 10 11

Clackmannan Kinross Cromarty Nairn Dumbarton Dumfries Edinburgh

18 Wigtown

Elgin Fife Forfar Haddington Inverness Kincardine Kirkcudbright

Dumfries

19 Lanark 20 Linlithgow 21 Orkney and Shetlands 22 Peebles 23 Perth 24 Renfrew

25 26 27 28 29 30

Ross Roxburgh Selkirk Stirling Sutherland Wigtown

Map 2 Parliamentary constituencies in Scotland, 1707–1832 (adapted from W. A. Speck, The Birth of Britain, Oxford, 1994).

Boundaries of provinces

A

County boundaries Londonderry 0

50 miles

0

80 km

ANTRIM

LONDONDERRY DONEGAL

Ballymena TYRONE

Belfast

Omagh

Enniskillen

Downpatrick Armagh

FERMANAGH

MONAGHAN

SLIGO

MAYO

B

DOWN

ARMAGH

Sligo

Newry

LEITRIM

Castlebar

Cavan

Dundalk

CAVAN

Westport

LOUTH

ROSCOMMON LONGFORD

Drogheda MEATH

WESTMEATH

Trim

GALWAY

Galway Maynooth OFFALY

Dublin

Naas KILDARE

D

LAOIS

Wicklow

CLARE

WICKLOW

Ennis Nenagh CARLOW

Limerick

KILKENNY

TIPPERARY

Kilkenny

LIMERICK

Cashel Tipperary

Tralee KERRY

Killarney

WEXFORD

Wexford Waterford

Mallow

WATERFORD

Dungarvan

CORK

Cork Cobh

Youghal

Bantry

C

Provinces A B C D

Ulster Connaught Munster Leinster

Map 3 Ireland in the eighteenth century (adapted from Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy, London, 1993).

Population Over 100,000 20,000– 100,000 10,000– 20,000 5,000– 10,000 2,500– 5,000

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Map 4 Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1700 (adapted from P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800, Oxford, 1982).

Population Over 100,000 20,000– 100,000 10,000– 20,000 5,000– 10,000 2,500– 5,000

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Map 5 Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1750 (adapted from P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800, Oxford, 1982).

Population Over 100,000 20,000– 100,000 10,000– 20,000 5,000– 10,000 2,500– 5,000

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5 miles

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Map 6 Towns with 2,500+ inhabitants in 1801 (adapted from P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800, Oxford, 1982).

S C H U S E T T

St Law ren ce R.

NTA

RIO

A

NEW YORK Ft Niagara

L. O

Hudson R. Connecticut R.

PROVINCE OF QUEBEC

S M A

S

Boston RHODE ISLAND

RIE

Ft Detroit

L. E

i R.

PENNSYLVANIA Philadelphia

Miam

Wabash R.

Montreal

NEW HAMPSHIRE

L. HURON

L. MICHIGAN

Quebec

Otta wa R .

L. SUPERIOR

Baltimore

New York

CONNECTICUT

NEW JERSEY DELAWARE

Ohio R

.

James R.

MARYLAND

Richmond

VIRGINIA

E

S

E

R

V

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NORTH CAROLINA

R N

n va Sa h

D

na

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Wilmington

SOUTH CAROLINA

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Charleston

GEORGIA Savannah WEST FLORIDA

New Orleans EAST FLORIDA GULF OF MEXICO

Original 13 colonies Other British territories

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250 miles

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Foreign areas Proclamation Line of 1763

Map 7 British North America c.1763 (adapted from H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution, London, 1998).

FLORIDA NAVAL BASES

BAHAMA ISLANDS Havana C

U

B

A

San Domingo

JAMAICA Port Royal

St

tius

Antigua s GUADELOUPE evi at N r St tser Marie Galante n Mo tes Dominica ain S e Martinique Th Fort Royal St Lucia Barbados St Vincent

sta

Eu

Kit

PORTO VIRGIN Is. RICO

HAITI

St

Santiago de Cuba

ts

Cap Francois

Grenada Tobago Curaçao TRINIDAD Porto Bello Panama

Da rie n

Cartagena 0

500 miles

Map 8 The Caribbean in the eighteenth century (adapted from Derek Jarrett, Britain 1688–1815, London, 1965).

0

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Orkney Is.

Outer Hebrides

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Prussia Leith Edinburgh St. Marys I. Belfast Newcastle Whitehaven IRELAND I. of Man Dublin Flamborough Liverpool Head Cork GREAT

BRITAIN

Texel

Bury St Edmunds

Amsterdam London R. T ha

mes

Austrian Netherlands

ENGLISH CHANNEL

Le Havre

dy

St Malo Lorient

an

rm

Brest

No

Ushant

R. Se in

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Paris

e R. Loir

Bay of Biscay

Bordeaux

Ferrol

R. Rhône

Cape Finisterre

FRANCE

Corunna

ne

on

r Ga R.

PORTUGAL Madrid

R. Tag

us

SPAIN

Lisbon

MAJORCA

MINORCA Mahon

Cape St Vincent MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Cadiz Algeciras

Gibraltar Ceuta

DENMAR K – NO R WAY

St Petersburg

RUSSIA

SWEDEN

Elsinore

R.

BALTIC SEA

PRUSSIA

Elb

e

Hanover

Berlin

R. V

ist

de R. O

United Provinces

ula

r

Anhalt

Waldeck HesseCassel

Brunswick Hanau

ine

R.

Rh

Vienna AnspachBayreuth

AUSTRIA (incl. HUNGARY) R. Danub e

R. Po

Toulon

CORSICA

KINGDOM SARDINIA

OF THE TWO SICILIES SICILY

Map 9 Europe c.1775 (adapted from H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution, London, 1998).

British territory in 1765

H IN

DU

KU SH

British territory in 1805

Sikhs HI

MA

G s ge an

Sind

Buxar

Sindia

Allahabad

YA

Patna

Benares

Holkar Gaikwar

Bengal Murshidabad

Bihar Plassey Chandernagore Calcutta

Dacca Hugli

Bhonsla

Gujarat Surat

LA

Oudh

R.

R.

In du s

Panipat Delhi Laswari Bharatpur

Argaum

Nagpur Assaye Nizam’s Bombay Dominions Poona

Orissa

Peshwa Hyderabad

Northern Circars Mysore

Arcot

Seringapatam Wandiwash ARABIAN SEA

Carnatic

B AY O F B E N G A L

Madras Pondicherry

Tanjore Trincomalee 0

Ceylon

0

500 miles 500 km

Map 10 Expansion of British power in India (adapted from P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford, 1998, p. 509).

Part I

Politics and the Constitution

Chapter One

The British Constitution H. T. Dickinson

The age of the democratic revolution in the late eighteenth century saw the beginnings of modern written constitutions, most notably the American Constitution of 1787 and a succession of constitutions in revolutionary France in the 1790s. The essential feature of the British constitution is not simply that it predates any of these modern constitutions, but that it is unwritten. Although some fundamental features of the British constitution were written down in legislative documents – for example, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and the Act of Union between England and Scotland – the English (later the British) constitution has evolved over centuries in various ways which were never written down. It is therefore largely a prescriptive and an organic constitution. The evolution of the British constitution was due to prolonged and successive disputes between the monarch and the greater nobility, between crown and parliament, and between parliament and people. These disputes sometimes led to armed conflict and political revolution, but, much more often, they have produced minor shifts in the balance of power and in constitutional arrangements between the various institutions and political agents in the state. Some of these changes were barely detected even by those who helped to make them. It is difficult to trace the shifting balance between crown and parliament that occurred almost imperceptibly throughout the whole eighteenth century or to state with precision what the constitution was at any particular date in that century. There was very considerable debate in the eighteenth century about both precisely what the constitution was and what it ought to be. These debates existed, in part, because the constitution was unwritten, evolutionary and shifting, but also because there were many and profound disputes between competing groups over how to interpret or amend that constitution. While modern historians may legitimately attempt to define the nature and features of the British constitution in the eighteenth century, they have to acknowledge the near impossibility of performing this task because the constitution never stood still even in periods of relative political stability, because so many contemporary political actors offered very different interpretations of the constitution and because the prevailing theory of

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the constitution and the actual practice of the constitution were never in exact alignment. If we wish today to explain the main features of the British constitution, then we need first to look at the contemporary debates on four aspects of that constitution: its origins, its structure, the location of sovereignty and the liberties of the subject. We then need to look at how the political system operated within these constitutional restraints: looking at the role of the monarch and his ministers, at the management of parliament and at church–state relations.

The Ideological Debate on the Constitution The origins of the constitution During the eighteenth century three different notions of the origins of the constitution were in contention – divine right, the original contract and the ancient constitution – but only the last of these secured overwhelming support. The upholders of divine right had largely prevailed before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Jacobites adhered to this doctrine well into the eighteenth century. The divine right theory had maintained that legitimate authority came only from God and that God favoured absolute monarchy. Kings ruled by the direct command of God and God had established a clear and inviolable rule, namely, indefeasible hereditary succession, to prevent a dangerous hiatus between the death of one ruler and his replacement by the legitimate heir. Subjects could not lawfully oppose the commands of their rulers and could not legitimately decide for themselves who would rule them. They could never possess the right to take up arms against the crown even to protect their lives, liberties and property. The willingness of men of property to put themselves at the mercy of an absolute king can be explained only by their horror of ‘mob’ rule and their fear of social revolution. They feared the tyranny of the unrestrained multitude more than the power of an absolute king. Some (though not all) Jacobites supported such views in the early eighteenth century, but, by the mid-eighteenth century, fear of a Catholic ruler, and growing confidence in their ability to operate the system of limited monarchy established by the Glorious Revolution, persuaded most men to abandon support for the theory of divine right. John Locke, in his celebrated Two Treatises of Government (1690), had argued that divine right was a slavish doctrine and that the only legitimate form of government was one established by consent and framed in order to secure for all men their natural rights to life, liberty and property. Governors could rightfully exercise power only so long as they preserved the natural rights of the governed. Should they grossly infringe these rights, the governed had the right to resist this abuse of power by force of arms, to dissolve the government, and to erect another which would better preserve the natural rights of subjects. Locke’s views were too liberal for most of his contemporaries and only a few radical Whigs endorsed his views in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the later eighteenth century, however, a number of radicals not only revived the notion of the original contract, but were much more explicit than Locke had been over the question of which men gave their express consent to the creation of civil government and how they would ensure that government defended the natural rights of all men. The most famous and influential of these radicals,

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Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man (1791–2), insisted that all adult males were involved in agreeing to the contracts which established civil society and civil government. He went on to argue that the only way to secure the natural rights of all men was to create a written constitution in which all men had the right to vote for the legislature which would make the laws and control the magistrates who enforced them. Despite the appeal of Paine’s ideas to some radicals, support for his desire for a democratic republic was never widespread in Britain, even among advanced reformers. Much the most widespread and prevalent notion of the origins of the constitution claimed that Britain possessed an ancient constitution which could be traced back many centuries. Many English commentators claimed that English law was customary and immemorial, the monarch’s authority had always been limited, the constitution was based on a mixed form of government, the supreme authority in the kingdom was the legislature of King, Lords and Commons, and subjects had the right to resist tyranny. Building upon these foundations, they asserted that the political institutions of the country and the liberties of Englishmen were of ancient vintage. It was firmly believed that this ancient constitution could be traced back to the AngloSaxon era before the Norman Conquest of 1066. This concept of the ancient constitution was used by the opponents of royal absolutism. They argued that subjects could throw off the ‘Norman yoke’ and assert their rights against monarchs who attempted to subvert their liberties. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 provided historical evidence of the readiness of the people to justify their legitimate constitutional rights, by force if necessary. Although a minority of radical Whigs justified the Glorious Revolution by appeals to the contract theory and by claims that the people had forcibly deposed James II because of his abuse of the constitution, the governing elite who successfully carried through the Revolution Settlement (both Whigs and Tories) insisted that they had not done anything so radical. They had sought to restore the ancient constitution by making only a slight alteration in the succession to the crown (in order to remove a Catholic monarch who could not be trusted to uphold the ancient constitution) and by restating the traditional privileges of parliament and the ancient liberties of the subject by such measures as the Bill of Rights and the Triennial Act. They had not claimed that power originated with the consent of the people or that ultimate sovereignty rested in the hands of the people. The Hanoverian succession in 1714, and the defeat of the Jacobite rebellions, both ensured that this view of the constitution would last throughout the eighteenth century. The ruling elite had no desire to see the people appeal to the contract theory or to the right of resistance in order to challenge their own right to govern. They played down the importance of Revolution principles as any sure guide to future political action. They feared that any undue emphasis on the people’s right of resistance would undermine the stability of the political and social order which they had established. When, in the later eighteenth century, radicals began either to claim that the Revolution Settlement had not gone far enough in restoring the liberties of the subject, or that it had justified the people’s right to remove a government which infringed their liberties, conservative voices were raised in defence of the older Whig claim that the Glorious Revolution deserved to be celebrated because it had carried through the limited changes needed to restore the ancient constitution. Edmund Burke main-

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tained that the constitution was prescriptive and had developed gradually over many centuries without conscious human contrivance or systematic design. It was the product of history and experience, not the deliberate result of human reason or will. Its authority rested not on any original contract or known first principles, but on the evidence that it had existed time out of mind and had made thousands of adjustments to the needs created by altered circumstances and the changing habits of the people. Burke entirely rejected the radical claim that British subjects had the right to cashier their governors for misconduct and to frame a new constitution for themselves. The Glorious Revolution had been conservative in its intentions and limited in the changes it had made. In essence, it was not so much a revolution made as one prevented. Burke’s case was put so effectively that some radicals abandoned the traditional historic appeal to the ancient constitution. Faced with the powerful claim that history could not be effectively used to demonstrate the traditional liberties of the subject, they appealed instead to reason and morality to justify the rights of the subject. Thomas Paine, in particular, argued that it was not sufficient to look back to the Glorious Revolution or to any earlier historic age. To understand the rights of man it was necessary to go much further back to the state man was in when he was first made by his creator. In Paine’s view, it was time to escape from the dead hand of history and the tyranny of the past. Despite his fame and political influence, however, he did not persuade most British radicals to abandon an appeal to the historic rights of the subject under the ancient constitution.

Mixed government and the balanced constitution Almost all commentators in the eighteenth century described the constitution as a limited or parliamentary monarchy whose main features and greatest virtues were that it was a mixed government and balanced constitution. There was much support for the claim that the structure of the British constitution was the best that could be attained in order to establish authority and preserve liberty on the basis of the rule of law. The constitution was regarded as being a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, because the supreme legislature was composed of the crown, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. This mixed form of government achieved the greatest number of advantages and the fewest evils of any political system. Three pure forms of government were recognized: namely, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Unfortunately, while each form had its merits, it was also undermined by a serious threat to liberty or authority. Monarchy avoided disputes over who had the legitimate right to exercise authority and it allowed a single ruler to act decisively in an emergency; but it placed the life, liberty and property of the subject at the mercy of one man who might act as an arbitrary tyrant. Aristocracy provided an able elite capable of leading and of offering an inspiring example to the nation, but it could too easily degenerate into a narrow oligarchy of warring, selfinterested factions. Democracy offered the greatest liberty to the ordinary subject, but it was often too slow to act and was so inherently unstable that it invariably soon collapsed into anarchy or mob rule. Almost all democracies either ended in bloodshed or were transformed into military dictatorships. On the other hand, a mixed

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form of government, which incorporated elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, could secure the benefits of each in their pure form while avoiding their disadvantages. Although mixed government was the best system that human wisdom had ever discovered, it was susceptible to corruption and dissolution if the three component elements did not coexist in harmony. Each element had a natural tendency to pull in its own separate direction and so it was only by carefully balancing them that they could remain harnessed together. Fortunately, the British constitution had secured all the benefits of mixed government because a constitutional balance had then been achieved between the three institutions of crown, Lords and Commons. Each of these institutions possessed its own peculiar privileges and distinct functions. As chief magistrate the king was above the law, was the fount of honour and public office, was the unchallenged head of the executive, and retained various prerogative rights, including the power to summon, prorogue and dissolve parliament. The aristocracy enjoyed the highest honours in the state, sat in the upper house of parliament as of right, and formed the highest court of justice in the land. The members of the House of Commons were the representatives of the people and, as such, defended the liberties of the subject, put forward the grievances of the people and initiated all taxes (and so controlled the supply of money entering the public purse). Besides these individual functions, all three institutions of crown, Lords and Commons combined to form the sovereign legislature. No bill could become law and no money could be raised without being approved by all three institutions in the same session of parliament. There was no strict separation of powers, even though the king appointed all executive posts, the House of Lords was the supreme court of law and the House of Commons voted the public revenue. The executive and the judiciary also interacted with the legislature: the king appointed the judges, who sat in the House of Lords, where they offered legal advice (though they could not vote), they held office during their good behaviour and could be dismissed only by a vote of both houses of parliament. Thus, the British constitution was a complicated system of checks and balances. It preserved the privileges of crown, aristocracy and people, while seeking to secure a harmonious relationship between all three. It was this delicate balance and this constitutional equilibrium that ensured that those twin goals of mixed government were achieved: namely, liberty and authority. It was not only the governing elite and their loyalist allies who praised mixed government and the balanced constitution. Most reformers, and a majority of those who supported the radical cause, were all convinced that the theoretical structure of the British constitution was without equal in the world. In practice, however, they saw that a monarch who misused his power could still threaten to overturn the delicate balance of the constitution.

The sovereignty of parliament In the eighteenth century most men were convinced that their property, their privileges and their liberties could be secured only if there existed a single supreme authority from whose decisions there could be no appeal. Political commentators insisted therefore that there must be a supreme, irresistible, absolute and uncontrolled

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authority in every state if order was to be maintained and anarchy avoided. Throughout the eighteenth century a clear majority of the political nation believed that the combined legislature of crown, Lords and Commons embodied this sovereign authority. Parliament could act as it saw fit and its actions could not be undone by any power on earth except a subsequent parliament. In his immensely influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9), William Blackstone insisted that the British legislature was sovereign and absolute and could change the constitution itself. Blackstone’s views were echoed many times in both houses of parliament. None the less, despite such repeated claims, it is misleading to believe that the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty gained universal approval or that it was unchallenged throughout the eighteenth century. There were criticisms of the sovereignty of parliament from both conservatives and radicals. There were conservative supporters of royal sovereignty not only while there was a Jacobite claimant to the throne, but long afterwards. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century there was a resurgence of support for the authority of the king. Several high church clergymen claimed that the king’s authority was still superior to that of parliament. The government of the Younger Pitt even had to condemn the constitutional claims made for George III by John Reeves, one of the government’s most fervent supporters, in his ultra-conservative tract, Thoughts on English Government (1795). For most of the eighteenth century many Whig and radical opponents of royal power were also concerned about the concept of an absolutely sovereign legislature. The genuine pride taken in the constitution and in the liberties of Englishmen, and the traditional hostility to arbitrary, absolute power, made many men doubt the wisdom of giving parliament completely unfettered authority. These doubts were expressed in a variety of arguments. One argument maintained that the law of God, derived either explicitly from the Bible or indirectly from the law of nature, was superior to that of any human agency. They stressed that no human power could command what was against the law of nature. The most common line of attack, however, was to appeal to the fundamental laws of the constitution. Sometimes it was claimed that specific constitutional decisions taken in the past were inviolable and could not be altered or repealed by subsequent acts of parliament. The examples most frequently cited were Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Triennial Act and the Act of Union with Scotland. More frequent still were complaints by opposition elements that ministers were introducing legislation which was contrary to the spirit of the constitution. Government policies towards the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s were frequently condemned in Britain as well as in the colonies for being unconstitutional. The American crisis forced some Whigs to revert to Locke’s position: in normal matters of government the legislature was sovereign, but it could not gravely infringe man’s natural and inalienable right to his life, liberty and property. The fundamental principles of the constitution were ultimately superior to the authority of parliament. The authority of parliament was bound by the principles of the constitution. The more advanced radicals located sovereign authority in the people. They insisted that the ultimate authority in the state resided in the collective will of the people, but they did not devise an effective means of establishing the sovereignty of the people. Some radicals did insist that members of parliament (MPs) were not independent representatives, who could vote on motions in parliament as they saw fit,

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but were delegates who could be instructed how to vote on major issues by the electors who returned them to parliament. A few radicals considered setting up a national convention which would allow the people to resume their sovereign rights and enable them to decide the best means of securing their constitutional liberties. Thomas Paine was convinced that the natural rights of man could be safeguarded only if a written constitution clearly restricted the authority of both the legislature and the executive. In his opinion, it was essential that such a written constitution should be the act of the whole people. It should establish not only the general principles within which government or legislature could operate, but should lay down detailed restrictions on the exercise of power. No part of the constitution could then be infringed either by government or parliament without breaching the trust of the people, dissolving civil government and returning the people to the state of nature. While the critics of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty did not succeed in having it rejected, they almost certainly convinced even its strongest supporters that it was a legal fiction. Its value and utility lay in preserving order while allowing for prompt action. These benefits, however, would have been jeopardized by any rash attempts to trample on the rights and liberties of the people. The assertion of the doctrine in the face of American resistance had resulted in the disastrous loss of the American colonies. Thereafter, even the staunchest advocates of a sovereign parliament were fully conscious of the general commitment to the notion of government by consent and the widespread support for the liberties of the subject. Edmund Burke stressed the dangerous consequences that might ensue if the legislature lost sight of the need to carry public opinion along with it.

The liberties of the subject In the eighteenth century many commentators praised the advantages which British subjects enjoyed as free men living under a free constitution. Although a narrow propertied elite clearly dominated government and parliament, those who admired the existing constitution confidently asserted that the British people possessed as much liberty as was consistent with the preservation of social order. On the other hand, there were also many radical commentators who criticized the actual working of the constitution and they often did so on the grounds that it was failing to safeguard the liberties of the people. There was a profound and prolonged debate between those who were confident that the British people did in reality possess considerable liberty and those who believed that they were being denied their liberty by a corrupt and reactionary governing elite. These differences rested, in part, upon conflicting assessments of what government and parliament were in fact doing to and for the subject, and, in part, on different perceptions of those legitimate rights and liberties which the people as a whole ought to possess. Defenders of the status quo believed that government and parliament were doing as much as possible to preserve the liberties of the subject, whereas critics complained that the governing elite were denying the people their historic, natural and legitimate rights. These opposed views were underpinned by different notions of what rights and liberties British subjects ought and could reasonably expect to possess. No commentator, no matter how conservative, was prepared to assert that the people were without any rights. On the other hand, there was a great deal of discussion and much heated debate over the

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precise nature and extent of the liberties which British subjects could legitimately demand as their historic or natural rights. It was accepted by all that every subject had the right to enjoy freedom from oppression and that each individual was free to do some things without interference from government or legislature. There was a moral limit to the power of government or parliament to interfere with the activities of subjects. It was also agreed that this sphere of free action could not be unlimited, because this would mean that no government or parliament could possess any legitimate or effective authority over its subjects. Even at their most limited, it was always claimed that the people’s civil liberties ensured the right of subjects to live under the rule of law and to have an equal opportunity of justice. Arbitrary authority was restrained by positive law, ancient custom and common law, or natural law to the extent that no subject could be imprisoned without trial; all men were subject to the same laws administered by the same law courts; no torture could be used to secure a confession; and no accused person could be convicted of a serious offence except after a trial by jury. Equal justice for all was not seen as the full extent of every subject’s claim to civil liberty. There was also almost universal agreement that all subjects had an inalienable right to their property. Locke’s views on this particular issue were widely accepted. Even the radicals of the late eighteenth century were prepared to defend both private property and its unequal distribution. Some quite explicitly denied that they desired to invade the rights of private property. The right to freedom of conscience was another important civil liberty which was conceded by many commentators. From Locke onwards several writers defended the right to freedom of worship, though many denied that Protestant Dissenters, Catholics and atheists could claim the same political rights as Anglican Protestants under an essentially Anglican Protestant constitution. Freedom of worship was given to Protestant Dissenters as early as the Toleration Act of 1689, but the survival of the Test and Corporation Acts ensured that they were still legally denied the right to take office under the crown or to serve in local government. The position of Roman Catholics was much worse. Under the constitution they were probably thirdclass citizens. Freedom of worship and various political rights and civil liberties were legally denied to Roman Catholics by a series of harsh penal laws passed by parliament in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is true that these were rarely implemented to their full extent, but, none the less, anti-Catholicism was a widespread prejudice in British society and indeed a defining characteristic of that society and its constitution. Anti-Catholicism was so virulent that when parliament sought to relieve Catholics of some of the penal laws in 1778, this minor concession provoked the Gordon Riots of 1780, the worst outbreak of public disorder in the eighteenth century. The demand for religious toleration generally advanced hand-in-hand with the campaign for a free press and for the free expression of political views. Prepublication censorship lapsed in 1695 and throughout the eighteenth century there was a very flourishing press in which parliamentary debates were reported, profound political issues could be debated, and frequent and harsh criticisms of the government were advanced. The principle of a free press was rarely challenged. In times of very severe political crisis, of course, the government was able to per-

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suade parliament to impose temporary restrictions on the press, but, more frequently, the government sought to restrict the circulation of the opposition press by imposing stamp duties which would increase the price of newspapers or by subsidizing the press, directly and indirectly, so that it would produce material favourable to the viewpoint of the governing elite. It was always recognized that subjects had the right to bring their grievances and complaints before king and parliament by means of private and public petitioning. In the last resort, moreover, it was generally acknowledged that subjects possessed the natural right to use force to preserve their liberty. The danger of relying on the right of resistance, however, was that it could be asserted only in a dire emergency when it might already be too late to preserve the people’s civil liberties. It made sense, therefore, to ensure that parliament, and, in particular, the House of Commons, was in a position to resist the abuse of power by the executive and was strong enough to defend the liberties of the subject. It was generally agreed that this could be done only if the House of Commons represented the people and their interests. Conservative commentators believed that the House of Commons did effectively represent the people and their interests. It was claimed that parliament represented all the powerful interests in the country since many of the greatest landowners, churchmen, lawyers, financiers, merchants, admirals, generals and businessmen sat in parliament, and MPs were elected from all areas of the country, and by rural communities and urban communities of all sizes and types. Once they were elected, MPs represented all their constituents, not just those who had voted for them. Indeed, they were the representatives of the British people as a whole. Moreover, the fact that large towns, such as Birmingham, Manchester or Sheffield, were not directly represented in parliament did not mean that their interests were neglected by a House of Commons in which there were many MPs representing similar towns. The voters too were men of property who were sufficiently educated and independent to be trusted with the important task of choosing the nation’s representatives. The franchise was rightly restricted to men of property, who could be trusted to exercise it wisely. They firmly rejected the radical claim that the vote should be given to the impoverished mob or rabble, who would be easily misled by corrupt men of wealth or by charismatic demagogues. The stability of the constitution depended on the representation of property because only men of independent means could be certain to possess the qualities to exercise a free choice among the candidates standing for election to the House of Commons. In contrast to those conservative voices who sought to defend the existing electoral system, there were reformers and radicals who insisted that the present restricted franchise returned parliaments which looked only after the interests of men of substantial property and which frequently failed to defend the liberties of most of the people. Whether they looked back to the historic rights of Englishmen under the ancient constitution or they appealed to the universal and inalienable natural rights of men, these radicals insisted that the constitution could not be safeguarded nor the rights of the people secured, unless the franchise was greatly extended. Some wanted to give the vote to all male householders because they would have some property to defend. Some suggested extending the franchise to all men who paid certain taxes and so contributed to the upkeep of the state, while the most radical commentators

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pressed for a universal adult male suffrage (though only a very tiny minority ever advocated votes for women).

The Working of the Constitution Although there was constant and sometimes intense ideological debate about the nature of the British constitution in the eighteenth century, the majority of the political elite during most of the period agreed on the major features of that constitution. They generally maintained that Britain possessed an ancient, prescriptive constitution; that liberty and stability were secured by Britain’s mixed government and balanced constitution; that the sovereign authority in the state was the combined legislature of crown, Lords and Commons; and that all British subjects possessed the right to justice in the rule of law, and freedom of conscience and expression, but that only a minority deserved the franchise. In order to understand how this system worked in practice, however, it is necessary to look at those political customs and practices which were nowhere embodied in formal acts of parliament. It is necessary in particular to look at the authority of the monarch and royal ministers, the management of parliament, and the relations between church and state.

Crown and executive In the earlier eighteenth century there were serious disputes and armed conflict about whether the Hanoverians or the Stuarts should sit on the throne, but at no stage was there marked hostility to monarchy as such and there was generally considerable support for those prerogatives of the crown that had survived the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. After the Glorious Revolution the crown lost some, but not all, of its prerogative powers. The monarch had to be a Protestant (and after 1701 had to be an Anglican Protestant) and had to appoint only Anglicans to offices in the state. The monarch ceased to be able to pass or seriously amend laws without consent of parliament and, because of the constant need for parliamentary taxation, the monarch had to summon annual sessions of parliament in order to finance government policies, particularly costly wars. Queen Anne was the last monarch to veto parliamentary legislation (in the first decade of the century) and, thereafter, the monarch had to accept bills passed by parliament. Despite these reductions in the prerogative powers of the crown, the monarch still possessed considerable political influence. The monarch was the supreme head of the Church of England. The monarch could still summon or prorogue parliament when it was most convenient to do so. The monarch always remained at the pinnacle of an aristocratic social hierarchy and leading politicians always sought access to the royal court in order to secure royal favour. Court posts conferred honour, distinction, influence and material rewards, but it was the monarch’s right to appoint to the leading positions in the government that made it vital for politicians to gain access to the monarch in the royal closet. In the last resort, all government measures required the monarch’s approval if they were to have any chance of passing through parliament. The leading government ministers were not in office because a majority in parliament, still less a majority of the electorate, had put them there. Ministers were first

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appointed by the monarch and only then did they seek majority support in parliament. Ministers could be dismissed at any time by the monarch, even while they seemed to retain majority support in parliament. The privy council ceased to act as a governing body in the eighteenth century, though it retained some honorific duties and ceremonial roles. The government was dominated by about fifteen politicians who held the highest posts in the state. These men sought to agree government policy in regular meetings of the cabinet or cabinet council, though increasingly the most important decisions were taken in advance by a less formal inner cabinet of about half a dozen ministers (usually including the head of the Treasury, the two secretaries of state, the lord chancellor and the lord president of the council). The monarch ceased to attend the cabinet council in person very early in the eighteenth century. The decisions taken by the inner or efficient cabinet had to be conveyed to the monarch in the royal closet and royal support had to be secured before measures were presented to parliament. The cabinet’s view usually prevailed, but it was not the final arbiter of government policy. The monarch always had to be persuaded and the monarch might have very decided views, especially on foreign policy and about other government appointments. Almost all administrations had a leading minister, who, from the earlier eighteenth century, came to be known as the prime minister. He was almost always the head of the Treasury. The prime minister, however, did not have as much authority as modern holders of this title. He did not appoint the rest of the cabinet – the monarch did. Although he might labour hard to bring in his friends and to exclude his rivals, this could be done only by gaining the ear of the monarch, usually through informal meetings in the royal closet. There was no doctrine of cabinet solidarity. Ministers might quite often disagree with one another and compete for the monarch’s support for their particular point of view. When the prime minister resigned or was dismissed, it was not necessary for the rest of the cabinet to leave office with him. The prime minister and his ministerial colleagues had three major political tasks to perform in order to retain royal favour and support: to maintain domestic peace, to avoid unsuccessful wars abroad, and to find the financial resources through loans and taxes to achieve these objectives. These tasks could be performed only with the support of both houses of parliament. As we shall see, this task was greatly eased by the extent of crown patronage. Indeed, it was crown patronage rather than the royal prerogative that allowed the monarch to establish and maintain the executive’s powerful influence in parliament.

The management of parliament There was no separation of powers in the British constitution. The leading members of the government (and even some officeholders whom we might today regard as civil servants) sat in parliament in order to promote the passage of government business through the legislature. The House of Lords did not directly oppose moneyraising bills in the eighteenth century and hence its constitutional role was less significant than that of the House of Commons, which did certainly control the purse strings of the state. The Lords however did contain many of the most important men in the country, in terms of wealth and status, and the clear majority of all cabinets were members of the upper chamber. Their debates and their decisions, especially on

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foreign affairs, religious issues and legal questions, therefore did carry weight. Administrations however rarely had much trouble in persuading a majority in the Lords to support their policies. There were fewer than 200 men qualified to sit in the Lords until the 1780s (another sixty or so were created in the last two decades of the eighteenth century). Some peers never attended because they were Catholics, too old and infirm, or too poor to afford the expense of another house in London. The highest recorded vote in the eighteenth century was when 176 peers voted on the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. Normally the attendance rarely reached 120 members, and much lower attendances were quite common. Even the right of peers to vote by proxy did not greatly increase the number of occasions when very high votes were recorded. This being the case, it is not surprising that the government found it relatively easy to dominate the Lords. Most of the leading members of the government and most important courtiers sat in the Lords. So did twenty-six bishops, sixteen elected Scottish representative peers, the most senior army and navy officers, the judges (who could speak but not vote), and several holders of royal pensions. The number of peers holding positions of profit or trust under the crown increased from about fifty earlier in the eighteenth century to around 100 by the later decades. Most lords lieutenant of the counties sat in the Lords and these men recommended the appointment of justices of the peace (JPs) and militia officers. Not surprisingly, therefore, most peers were usually attached to the government of the day and helped it to frustrate most opposition campaigns. The government found it much more difficult to manage the House of Commons, though even in this chamber ministers suffered relatively few defeats in the eighteenth century. The House of Commons was a larger chamber: 513 MPs prior to the union with Scotland in 1707 and a further forty-five MPs thereafter. The Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 added another 100 MPs. Most MPs were men of considerable wealth and status (a large majority were landed gentlemen, and all were supposed by law to possess substantial real estate), and they cherished at least the impression of being independent of the crown and certainly resented being regarded as servile creatures of the government. Some MPs, however, hardly ever attended debates and 400 was a very high attendance figure in any great crisis. The political loyalties of a significant number of MPs were influenced by crown and aristocratic patronage. Many crown appointments, titles and honours – in the state’s bureaucracy (especially in the Treasury) and in the church, the armed forces and the legal profession – were granted to MPs or their relatives and clients. A number of parliamentary seats, including some treasury boroughs, admiralty boroughs, the Cinque Ports and some boroughs in the duchy of Cornwall, returned MPs in the crown interest. By such means crown patronage could strongly influence though not entirely control the votes of about 100 MPs in the earlier eighteenth century and perhaps 200 in the later eighteenth century. This bloc of pro-government MPs was usually known as the Court and Treasury party, though the loyalty of its members could never be absolutely guaranteed when the government faced a severe crisis. Aristocratic influence over MPs was also substantial. Many of these peers were supporters of the government, though, of course, some supported the opposition. About fifty Irish peers or sons of English peers sat in the House of Commons early in the eighteenth century. By the 1740s this number had increased to about 100 and fifty years later it had increased to about 120 MPs.

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Peers also influenced the results in a significant number of parliamentary constituencies. They carried considerable interest in about 100 seats in the earlier eighteenth century and double that by late in the century. Despite the growing influence over MPs exercised by the crown and the members of the House of Lords, the House of Commons could never be managed by patronage alone. Any successful administration had to have other means to influence the votes of the independent backbenchers. The leading ministers gathered able men of business around them to win over opinion-formers on the backbenches. Parliamentary debates were vital in persuading the uncommitted backbencher and hence effective ministerial teams of fine orators and expert debaters had to be deployed. MPs could also be influenced before a session started by efforts to explain government policy through the despatch of circular letters to the constituencies or through ministerial addresses to large numbers of backbenchers in private meetings. Ministers had also to be excellent man-managers, prepared to invite MPs to private meetings or able to lobby or buttonhole MPs in the chamber, and thus win them over to the government side by persuasion. Robert Walpole and Lord North possessed such skills personally. William Pitt the Younger was too cold and aloof to perform such tasks, but the work was done for him by able lieutenants such as Henry Dundas and Henry Addington. Effective administrations also manipulated parliamentary procedures to government advantage. They sought the election of a Speaker of the House, who would be at least sympathetic to the government side, if not usually servile. They worked even harder to ensure that the chairmen of parliamentary committees (especially the committee of supply and the committee of ways and means, which handled financial matters) were government supporters. Debates could be held at times which many backbench MPs found inconvenient: very early or very late in the session, or very late in the day. In a difficult situation popular opposition proposals might be allowed to pass an unmanageable House of Commons, but were defeated in a more compliant House of Lords. In a real emergency even a powerful administration might retreat rather than pursue a policy that was alienating too many MPs. Thus, Walpole abandoned his excise scheme in 1733, Henry Pelham repealed the Jewish Naturalization Act after a few months in 1753, and William Pitt abandoned his Irish trade proposals in 1785. What needs to be recognized, however, is that all successful administrations stayed in office for long periods because their policies were acceptable to the majority of the House of Commons (and also to public opinion outside parliament). Able ministers made shrewd assessments of how to maintain order and stability at home, how to please the most powerful interests in the state, how to raise the necessary loans and taxes to fund government policies, and how to keep the peace abroad or, if necessary, fight successful wars against the nation’s enemies. Failure on one or more of these fronts was responsible for bringing down most administrations during the eighteenth century.

Church and state The Church of England was the most important institution in the state in the later seventeenth century and it was intimately bound up with government, landownership and the social hierarchy. It was impossible to ignore the influence of the church

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or its authority in all facets of the life of all subjects. At this time the clergy accepted their role as servants of a personal monarchy and as advocates of an authoritarian state. They preached obedience to the powerful in the state and stressed the authority of the king in particular. They regarded disobedience as a sin and exercised a comprehensive control over the morals and religious duties of the laity. The Church of England claimed the loyalty of all subjects in England and Wales and wished to maintain strict religious conformity so that all subjects would be compelled to attend services in its churches regularly. The Glorious Revolution began a process that saw significant changes in the relationship between church and state. The Church of England undoubtedly lost some of its special privileges. It found it increasingly difficult to support divine right monarchy and to preach its ideological support for the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. The Toleration Act of 1689 formally allowed Protestant Dissenters to worship freely outside the Church of England and gradually Roman Catholics were allowed similar rights in practice. The Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 brought a largely Presbyterian country into the state and recognized the existence of a different state church in the northern kingdom, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. It was therefore legally possible for many British subjects to choose to attend the services of other denominations than those of the Church of England. All hopes of religious uniformity in the state vanished. The governing institution in the church – Convocation, with its two houses of bishops and representatives of the lower clergy – expressed the dissatisfaction of many clergy in the earlier eighteenth century, but, when the disputes reached fever pitch over the Bangorian controversy in 1717, the government ended its meetings. Apart from a brief meeting in 1741, when no business was actually conducted, Convocation ceased to meet until 1855. The crown, advised by leading ministers, regularly appointed bishops who could be expected to work closely with the government on political matters. The church was regarded by many Whig politicians as an arm of an Erastian state. Furthermore, even the ecclesiastical courts steadily lost authority over the morals of the laity in the early eighteenth century. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 also meant the end of the powers of religious censorship previously exercised by the church. Unorthodox religious views and anti-clerical arguments flourished in the eighteenth-century press. Throughout the eighteenth century most conservative clergy of the Church of England wished to return to a situation in which church and state worked together to support an authoritarian regime. Almost all of the clergy wished at least to maintain the remaining privileges of the Church of England. The leading politicians recognized the political value of the church and so an alliance of church and state was maintained, though it was never an alliance of equals but an uneasy agreement which often found some of the clergy dissatisfied with the church’s subordinate role. The Church of England remained the state church and from 1701 the monarch was required to conform to the state church not just to exercise supreme authority over it. The Test and Corporation Acts of the later seventeenth century, which laid down that only those who conformed to the Church of England could hold office under the crown or serve in town corporations, remained on the statute books until 1828. Repeated attempts to repeal them failed, though regular indemnity acts after 1727 did enable Protestant Dissenters to evade the restrictions of the Corporation Act.

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The twenty-six bishops in the Lords were expected to place their votes and their voices at the disposal of the government and generally did so unless they thought the remaining privileges of the Church of England were in danger. Bishops often wrote pro-government pamphlets, canvassed for pro-government candidates in elections, and delivered pro-government sermons on key dates in the calendar, such as the monarch’s birthday, the anniversary of Charles I’s execution on 30 January, the anniversary of Charles II’s restoration on 29 May, and the anniversary of William III’s landing at Torbay on 4 November 1688. The crown and the aristocracy could also exercise considerable authority over thousands of ordinary parish clergy because so many clergymen obtained their livings through lay patronage. The church as a whole still possessed considerable wealth and property and it continued to play a major role in providing education, distributing charity and disseminating news and views. Clerical propaganda played a major role in promoting the notion of a Protestant constitution and of a Protestant people constantly at war with militant Catholicism and French absolutism. In periods of crisis the clergy regularly played an important role in promoting Fast Days and in propagating a conservative ideology in defence of the status quo. Both the ruling elite’s right to govern and the duty of subjects to obey were constantly sanctioned by the clergy. The clergy also frequently campaigned against vice and immorality and served the state as well as the church by promoting such moral virtues as humility, sobriety, frugality and industry. Moreover, the church’s parish structure remained the basic unit of local government in rural and urban areas and did much to administer the system of poor relief in particular. For a large proportion of the population the Church of England’s ceremonies and rituals marked their major rites of passage through life. It offered a focus to their daily lives and a consolation in death.

FURTHER READING Browning, Reed: Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, LA, 1982). Cannon, John: Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984). Clark, J. C. D.: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (1985; rev. edn, Cambridge, 2000). Dickinson, H. T.: Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973). Dickinson, H. T.: ‘The eighteenth-century debate on the sovereignty of parliament’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976), pp. 198–210. Dickinson, H. T.: Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977). Gibson, William: The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London, 2001). Goldsworthy, Jeffrey: The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (Oxford, 1999). Gunn, J. A. W.: Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1987). Kenyon, John P.: Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977). Namier, Lewis and Brooke, John (eds): The House of Commons 1754–1790 (3 vols, London, 1964).

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Pocock, J. G. A.: Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays in Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985). Robbins, Caroline: The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA, 1959). Sack, J. J.: From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c.1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993). Thomas, P. D. G.: The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1971).

Chapter Two

The British State Eckhart Hellmuth (Translated by Angela Davies)

Historians and historical sociologists have always found the British state both fascinating and irritating. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Otto Hintze developed his pioneering but still influential theory of state formation, an analysis of conditions in the early modern British state was one of the central planks of his argument. For Hintze, the political and administrative profile of the British state at that time was characterized by ‘parliamentarism and self-government’, and he contrasted it with the continental variant. This he described as ‘military absolutism with a bureaucratic administration’, which for him was exemplified by the Prussian state in the eighteenth century. Hintze accounted for the fact that the political and administrative profiles in the two cases were so different by pointing to their respective geopolitical frameworks. In concrete terms, this means that their geographical location forced the continental powers to build up powerful armies. And, in order to finance and maintain such armies, an efficient bureaucracy acting in the spirit of the absolutist state was a prerequisite. Britain, by contrast, as an island state, did not need to maintain large land forces. Consequently, it could dispense with a substantial state apparatus. Hintze is not the only scholar to have seen Britain as a comparatively stateless nation. A number of authors who have established a link between the state-building process and economic development have argued along similar lines. Among others, Charles Tilly and Brian Downing have suggested that the extraction of resources was simpler in a highly commercialized society like eighteenth-century Britain than in the still predominantly agrarian societies of continental Europe. As a result, it is argued, Britain, in contrast to Prussia, the Habsburg Empire and France, for example, could make do with a slim state apparatus.

War and Taxation This view of the British state in the eighteenth century, which has left deep traces in the literature, has since been subjected to a thoroughgoing revision. The crucial step in this direction was taken by John Brewer in his book, The Sinews of Power,

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published in 1989, which built on the earlier work of Daniel Baugh, Patrick O’Brien and Geoffrey Holmes. In Brewer’s account, the British state of the eighteenth century emerges as a powerful and efficient machine. A fiscal and military apparatus, peerless in Europe, appears in his work. It is not without irony that Brewer operates with an explanatory model that resembles Hintze’s in that he establishes a causal connection between war, finance and bureaucracy. Indeed, in Brewer’s account the key to understanding the processes which formed the British state apparatus of the eighteenth century lies in this causal connection. Britain was almost continuously involved in military conflicts for long periods during the long eighteenth century (1688–1815): the Nine Years’ War (1689–97), the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13), the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20), the War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739–43), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the War of American Independence (1775–83), the War with Revolutionary France (1793–1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). This means that out of about 140 years, Britain was at war for almost seventy. Among the states of continental Europe, only France, Britain’s biggest rival, could compare in this respect. Britain’s participation in this game of Monopoly of Power, as played by the European states of the eighteenth century, was accompanied by the development of a formidable military apparatus. With the exception of the War of the Austrian Succession, each military conflict in which Britain was involved witnessed an increase in the size of its fighting forces, in both the army and the navy. Whereas parliament had granted money for a good 100,000 men in the army and the navy during the Nine Years’ War, by the time of the War of American Independence this figure had risen to almost 200,000. The largest fighting force that Britain mobilized during the long eighteenth century was undoubtedly that which fought in the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of this conflict, about 500,000 men were under arms in the army and the navy. The shape of the British military apparatus differed substantially from that of its rivals on the continent of Europe. In cases of military conflict, considerable numbers of foreign troops were hired to supplement the regular units of the standing army and large subsidies were paid to foreign powers. In addition, when it was a matter of defending home territory the militia, which was revived on a new basis in the 1750s, could be mobilized. What was different about the military efforts of the British state in the eighteenth century, however, was the significance attached to the navy. The fleet afloat was the largest concentrated population outside London (40,000). To invest in the navy was an obvious step, given Britain’s geopolitical situation. Moreover, Britain’s role as a global player, whose strategic interests stretched from Calcutta to Boston, and from Jamaica to Newfoundland, demanded that it show the flag on the seas of the world. At the same time, it was extremely expensive to maintain a fleet which, at times of war, could include up to 300 ships of the line (in the Seven Years’ War). The infrastructure alone that was required to build, equip and maintain the fleet (dry docks, stores, roperies, building yards, and so on) consumed huge amounts of money. It has been estimated that the per capita cost of a wartime sailor was double that of a soldier in the army. The military in Britain was not a creature of the monarchical will, as was the case, as a rule, on the continent, but was subject to strict parliamentary controls. Yet even so, spending on military purposes accounted for the vast majority of the state’s expen-

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diture. Between 1688 and 1815 more than 80 per cent of the public money spent by the British state went on the army, the navy, subsidies for foreign troops and the repayment of debts incurred as a result of previous wars. Thus, Britain spent a similar proportion of its income on military purposes as did the eighteenth-century Prussian state, which historians frequently see as epitomizing a militarized polity. Moreover, on a per capita basis, Britain spent more on warfare than any other European state in this period. Naturally, the level of spending on the military varied depending on whether the country was at peace or at war, but even in peacetime it was rare for more than one-fifth of state expenditure to be used for civilian purposes. By far the most expensive war that Britain waged during the long eighteenth century was that with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It has been estimated that this military conflict, lasting more than twenty years, cost around £1,039 million in current prices and that the total expenditure corresponded to something like six times the value of prewar national income. With every new military conflict in which Britain was involved, the national debt rose. At the end of the Nine Years’ War this had been just under £17 million; by the end of the War of American Independence it had risen to more than £220 million. The war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France resulted in another explosive increase in the national debt, from £290 million in 1788–92 to £862 million in 1815. Or, to express it in a different way, while at the end of the seventeenth century the national debt amounted to less than 5 per cent of gross national product, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it accounted for more than 10 per cent. The fact that the British state did not collapse under the weight of this debt was connected, among other things, with the fact that it was able to borrow constantly increasing amounts of money at low rates of interest. The average rate of interest on government loans fell from 8 to 9 per cent to below 5 per cent between the wars against Louis XIV and the wars against Napoleon. Yet government loans were an attractive investment for many contemporaries because the British state was much more creditworthy than its counterparts on the continent. The difference in political conditions was the key to this. Their autocratic character and opaque fiscal policies meant that monarchical regimes on the continent represented a high credit risk and, consequently, their creditors charged high rates of interest. In Britain, the situation was different. Here parliament, which urged financial prudence and transparency, guaranteed the national debt. It earmarked specific taxes for the payment of specific stock issues, so that anyone who invested in government stock had the guarantee of a safe return. The negative aspect of this was that Britain became one of the most heavily taxed nations in Europe. The British state extracted more in taxes from its subjects than did absolutist France, and from the late seventeenth century the curve of tax revenue was a steeply rising one. Between the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic Wars the aggregate net tax revenue grew tenfold. During the same period the total revenue per capita rose by a factor of 4.5. The main burden was carried by England and Wales, while Scotland made only a modest contribution and Ireland hardly contributed at all. This increase in the tax burden was accompanied by a structural change in the tax system. Direct taxes (notably the land tax), which as late as 1700 had formed the main source of the state’s income, were eclipsed by indirect taxes, most notably by excise duties, which were levied on many everyday com-

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modities (for example sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, salt, beer, hops, malt, candles, soap, wine and spirits). Towards the end of the eighteenth century (1790), indirect taxes accounted for 75 per cent of the total tax revenue, the vast majority of which was generated by the excise. There were a number of reasons why this rigid tax system was, on the whole, accepted, despite occasional protests. There were no tax exemptions for particular privileged groups, as was the case in many continental states. Taxes were to a large extent ‘invisible’; they were ‘hidden’ in the price of everyday commodities that were subject to the excise. Above all, however, the British tax system enjoyed a high degree of legitimacy as its source was the will of parliament, not that of an autocratic ruler. The efficiency with which the British state taxed its subjects was also the outcome of a gradual reform and development of the fiscal administration. Between 1660 and the early eighteenth century this fiscal administration evolved into an effective instrument for ensuring that the state was continuously supplied with money. A number of boards and departments were either newly established or restructured. The Treasury, as the body controlling both income and expenditure, was at the heart of this new institutional arrangement. And the period saw an increase in the number of centrally appointed, highly professional government officials, who helped to create an administration of considerable calibre. Geoffrey Holmes estimates that, by 1720, there were approximately 12,000 permanent employees in government service. The majority of these functionaries worked in the revenue departments and, of these, most worked in the excise. It is highly likely that British society had a greater proportion of government officials than, for example, Prussian society in the eighteenth century. This ‘new’ fiscal administration displayed many features that are generally associated with a modern bureaucracy. Its members were full-time employees, who were expected to display loyalty, honesty and devotion to office. Their income came not from fees, but from regular salaries. Promotion within individual departments followed an established system of graded appointments; the main criteria for promotion were merit and achievement. At the end of such a career there was, as a rule, retirement with a government pension. Standards within the service were safeguarded either by entrance examinations, or by a period of practical training. Departments developed their own systems of record-keeping, defined office procedures and routines, and, not least, developed something like an esprit de corps. Thus, we have the paradoxical situation that the allegedly weak British state possessed a fiscal administration which, in terms of professionalism and efficiency, was probably unique in Europe.

The Machinery of the State To define the state is an extremely difficult task. Historians have proposed different solutions. Otto Hintze suggested that the state was an institution with the power of coercion, whose purpose was to maintain the conditions necessary for internal and external security, and to provide for the common good. John Brewer defined the state as a territorially and jurisdictionally delimited political entity in which public authority is distinguished from (though not unconnected to) private power, and which is overseen by officials whose primary (though not sole) allegiance is to a set of political institutions under a single, sovereign authority. Joanna Innes considered

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the state as consisting of the whole array of institutions which participate in the spending of public monies, and in the legitimate exercise of coercive power. Such attempts to define the state are by no means superfluous theoretical exercises, for upon them depends to some extent how we ‘read’ the history of the state. If we accept Joanna Innes’s expansive definition of the state, we naturally look at the traditional machinery of local government, which, with its staff and institutions, is difficult to fit into the Weberian idea of the modern state. This traditional machinery of local government gained in importance during the eighteenth century. It seems that the reconfiguration of central government institutions which accompanied the rise of the fiscal-military state absorbed so much energy that central bodies lost interest in intervening at local level. Although new forms of central–local interaction developed, it is quite clear that as far as domestic politics were concerned, state power was highly decentralized. Thus, it is no coincidence that in Britain there were comparatively few institutions at central level. Essentially, in the eighteenth century these were the Treasury, the Navy Office, the Post Office, the offices of the two or three secretaries of state, and the Board of Trade. The Home Office, as a separate institution, was created only in 1782. The central government of other European states could draw upon a much wider repertoire of institutions. The Prussian state in the late eighteenth century, for instance, had more than a dozen ministries and departments whose main purpose was regulating and improving society. In Britain, this job was to a much larger extent the responsibility of the local authorities. This was true, albeit in different ways, of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Thus, in England, for example, at the level of counties and towns a whole array of people and institutions existed to supervise public relief, guarantee security and administer justice. The most prestigious office in the counties was that of the lord lieutenant. The lord lieutenant, supported by a number of deputies lieutenant, whose number depended on the size of the county, was, as a rule, a peer who normally enjoyed royal patronage. The lord lieutenant commanded the militia and nominated the justices of the peace (JPs), who were the key figures in governing Britain in the localities. They were drawn mainly from among people of wealth and standing, and in the later eighteenth century a considerable number of clergy joined their ranks. JPs were not professional officials such as were increasingly found in the bureaucracies of the continental states during the eighteenth century because they were not remunerated for their work, and they had no formal qualifications for office. Thus, to some extent, they were amateurs. Yet they covered an astonishingly broad field of activities, ranging from judicial functions to a great variety of administrative responsibilities. JPs were responsible for suppressing uprisings, and they were concerned with poor relief, the food supply, and prices and wages. They were considered the guardians of public morals, tightened licensing laws, inaugurated anti-vagrancy campaigns, and dealt with gaming houses and the suppression of disorderly behaviour. They exercised responsibility over roads and bridges, supervised gaols and houses of correction, and appointed parish officers. Above all, however, JPs were also pillars of the British judicial system. Although they were not entitled to decide in cases of life and death, they did try a variety of non-capital cases. In order to fulfil such a large number of functions, they acted either alone, in groups of two or more (petty sessions), or in quarter sessions. The type of business to be done at each level was precisely regulated. Outside the county structure of local government there were about

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200 incorporated towns, in which the mayor, aldermen and common councillors enjoyed powers similar to those of JPs. Because of their urban environment, they were forced to devote themselves to issues that were less important in the countryside, such as sanitation, fire prevention, the prevention of begging and prostitution, the policing of markets, and so on. The most basic unit of administration in England and Wales was the parish. Totalling 15,000 in number, parishes varied greatly in size. About 90 per cent had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. The administrative tasks were performed by a number of parish officials, including churchwardens, surveyors of the highways, constables and overseers of the poor. Service in the parish offices was unpaid and compulsory. Most of these parish officials were ordinary householders taking their turn at bearing public responsibilities. Some held office for longer periods of time, so that they built up considerable expertise in their particular field. As the various titles of the parish officials suggest, the parish was charged with a wide range of responsibilities. In order to fulfil these duties, parish authorities were entitled to raise taxes. In the course of the eighteenth century it seems to have become increasingly usual to use salaried officers of various kinds at this level. The older literature on the genesis of the early modern state treated this system of local administration with derision. This criticism is problematic in several respects. First, the differences between British and continental conditions were probably not as great as some historians have assumed. Most continental European states in the eighteenth century had officeholders who would be difficult to fit into the ideal type of a modern bureaucracy. In addition to the officials appointed by the central government, there were frequently elected and amateur local officials, people who had bought or inherited their office, and clergy who performed semi-official functions. Often, too, the organs of the estates were also involved in the administration of a territory. Second, the much-derided English amateur officials were by no means incompetent officeholders entrenched in their local world. Rather, there is much to suggest that we are dealing here with a qualified administrative elite. Of course, it is easy to find evidence that this system of local government could acquire oligarchic tendencies, that its actors allowed themselves to be led by the prejudices and interests of their own class, and that incompetence and corruption did exist. But, at the same time, there are countless examples which point in the opposite direction. Many JPs were undoubtedly committed to the common good, tried to carry out their official business with fairness, were well informed and displayed considerable creativity in solving problems. But, in this context, something else is important. Local officials were not restricted to their immediate environment; they did not act within a largely autonomous cosmos. Rather, they cooperated frequently and effectively with central government. Thus, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, the British parliament issued a stream of legislation which concerned local government. Similarly, the central executive directly influenced the world of counties and towns via a large number of directives. This does not, however, alter the fact that local officials in Britain enjoyed an unusually high degree of autonomy. Against the background of the discussion so far, the question arises of whether a highly decentralized system, such as that found in Britain in the eighteenth century, was superior to other contemporary models. This question is all the more justified as historians who study continental Europe are becoming increasingly aware that the

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equation of centralization with efficiency is highly problematic. If we look more closely at the politics of the absolutist states on the continent, it emerges that bureaucracies working at local level, which were regularly inundated with edicts, were only to a limited extent able to translate the will of the ruler into reality. All this suggests that systems of government which granted local officials a considerable degree of autonomy and freedom of action frequently worked better than more bureaucratic and centralized systems. The shortcomings of this system of local government were compensated for by the fact that eighteenth-century British society had an astonishing capacity to carry out projects on a voluntary basis. Voluntary societies became active when the established local authorities were unable, or unwilling, to undertake certain tasks. Thus, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) took up the cause of founding charity schools. Or to take another example, in the later eighteenth century the Association for the Prosecution of Felons worked for a stricter enforcement of the criminal law. Voluntary societies were an attractive option for contemporaries because they made it possible to react in a spontaneous and flexible manner. Moreover, Britons often saw in voluntary forms of effort an adequate instrument to tackle certain problems because they had fundamental reservations about ‘strong’ government. British political society had a deep aversion to anything associated with the taint of absolutism. To minimize state activity was regarded as progress towards greater civilization: ‘The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion it has for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself.’ ‘Government is no further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent.’ These quotations come from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Paine was a former revenue officer and government official turned political radical. In many respects Paine was undoubtedly a political outsider, yet in his attitude towards the state he captured the spirit of his times. While British society was prepared to accept a formidable fiscalmilitary apparatus supervised by parliament, any attempt by central government to implement a systematic domestic policy remained anathema. This does not mean, however, that central government played only a marginal role in domestic policy. In particular parliament, which passed almost 14,000 acts between 1688 and 1801, was extremely active in this area. Although the majority of ‘public acts’ concerned the fiscal-military state (raising taxes, waging war, and so on), MPs also used this type of legislation to tackle problems such as poverty, vagrancy and crime, and to intervene in the economy and labour relations. Such interventions were, as a rule, largely piecemeal, yet they left deep traces in the lives of contemporaries. This was even more the case with the more numerous ‘private acts’ of parliament, on the basis of which, for example, the so-called improvement commissions were established. (These numbered about 1,800 by 1830.) These were local statutory bodies whose objective was to provide solutions to specific problems, mainly improving the infrastructure, on an ad hoc basis. It was thanks to the work of these improvement commissions that during the eighteenth century Britain was covered by an increasingly dense network of turnpikes and canals. Like most European states of the eighteenth century, Britain was also characterized by a mixture of old and new, of central and local power, of state and non-state initiatives. Yet it appears that Britain managed to reconcile these opposing elements

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more successfully than other states. Perhaps the best example of this is what Joanna Innes has called the ‘mixed economy of welfare’. The main pillar of this was poor relief paid out of the parish rates. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, this system raised the remarkable amount of £4 million per annum for distribution among the poor, orphans, the old and the sick. Although this nationwide relief system was executed at local level, its (general) basis was parliamentary legislation in the form of the Poor Law, whose origins go back to the sixteenth century. ‘Legal charity’ was supplemented by ‘voluntary charity’. Thus, for example, voluntary hospitals, founded in many parts of the country, catered for the needs of the sick poor. There were many other subscription-funded charitable institutions, and their number multiplied over the course of the eighteenth century. And, finally, there was institutionalized self-help in the form of ‘box clubs’ or ‘friendly societies’, which provided humbler folk with primitive insurance benefits. The fate of those afflicted by poverty and sickness in eighteenth-century Britain was certainly not an easy one, but it was very likely less harsh than in most other European states at this time. One can speculate whether the success of this highly pragmatic system of domestic administration was partly responsible for the fact that no broad public debate about the goals and tasks of the state developed in British society. In the central European states, in particular, such a debate took place with great intensity. Although these ancien régime states were often unable to realize their political goals, there was a permanent discourse in which servants of the state and other enlightenment intellectuals thought about what fields should be permanently brought into the ambit of the state. This intense process of reflection was expressed in a multi-faceted science of government and administration (Polizei- und Kameralwissenschaften) and the theory of natural law, which, as it were, provided the blueprint for the interventionist state of the future. Revealingly, there was nothing comparable in Britain.

Corruption and Reform For the historian, the eighteenth-century British state is difficult to come to grips with because it had several different aspects. It possessed an efficient fiscal and a powerful military apparatus, which allowed Britain to become the dominant world power. Side-by-side with this there was the traditional system of local administration, which, despite its idiosyncrasies, probably worked better than the systems in place in most other European states. But it should not be overlooked that the British state still had an archaic side, for the new administration which the fiscal-military state generated did not replace existing institutions but was added on to them. These older departments in particular, which had not been modernized, attracted increasing criticism and were seen by contemporaries as embodying ‘old corruption’. Old corruption involved practices which, at least in the advanced continental bureaucracies, had largely been eliminated by the second half of the eighteenth century. Government offices degenerated into sinecures in various different forms. There were well-paid offices which were not associated with any duties; in other cases, officeholders drew emoluments from an office, but the actual work was done by others who were fobbed off with a fraction of the income from the office. Reversions (the right of succession to an office or place of emolument after the death or retirement of a holder) allowed ministers and high government officials to provide kinsmen with office. Whether they

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were qualified for the job counted for little. There were other practices that were condemned by contemporary critics: pensions, government contracts and church preferment were showered on those who proved themselves to be loyal supporters of the government of the day. Such corrupt practices made some critical contemporaries see the British state as a degenerate and parasitic monster which consumed vast sums of tax revenues and had become a vehicle of personal enrichment. Criticisms of this sort had already been voiced during the first half of the eighteenth century, in the context of the ‘Country’ opposition of the 1730s, for example. But the extra-parliamentary reform movement of the 1760s and 1770s gave this criticism a new quality. Thanks to John Wilkes and to Christopher Wyvill’s Association Movement, the idea that the British state was parasitical, wasted taxes and shamelessly enriched a small elite entered the British collective consciousness in an unprecedented way. The disastrous outcome of the American War of Independence only strengthened this tendency. Military failures, a growing state debt and the resulting rise in taxes revived ‘Country’ criticisms of the corrupt British state. In the early 1780s the Association Movement and metropolitan radicals demanded the end of practices which, in their eyes, were corrupt. The call for parliamentary reform was not least the result of a failure to achieve economical reform, which, it was hoped, would put an end to, in contemporary jargon, ‘extravagance’. Criticism voiced inside and outside parliament in the early 1780s was not without effect. It led to a number of reform measures and steps. From 1780, for example, the Rockingham Whigs made serious attempts to make the machinery of state more efficient and, at the same time, to reduce the cost of running it. The Establishment Act of 1782 abolished 130 ‘inefficient offices’, and for a number of offices casual emoluments were replaced by salaries. Moreover, on Lord North’s initiative, the Commission for Examining the Public Accounts was established in 1780. Convinced that government should be as cheap as possible, and disturbed at the dramatically rising costs generated by the central bureaucracy during the American War, the commissioners made a number of radical and comprehensive reform proposals. If they had been realized, they would have wiped out the system of old corruption. But this did not happen. Pitt, who had come to power in 1784, accepted only a limited number of the commissioners’ suggestions. No more than three of their numerous proposals were put into practice, and one of these was the proposal to appoint another commission to look into fee-taking in all the public departments. But this commission suffered a similar fate to that of the Commission for Examining the Public Accounts. It stopped work in 1789, after examining only ten of the twenty-four offices originally identified for inspection. The practical effect of its work was minimal. This lack of commitment to reforming the administrative sector is all the more surprising because Pitt, by contrast, pursued the restructuring of the national budget with great vigour. All attempts to restrain the Leviathan failed. On the contrary, the war effort during the war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France dampened all attempts at reform. The failure to make systematic administrative improvements led to increased criticism of the old corruption – by William Cobbett in particular. The view was widespread that the price the taxpayer had to pay to support the British war machine was simply too high, and that many profiteers – contractors, sinecurists, speculative investors, and so on – were thriving in the shadows of this apparatus,

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at everybody’s cost. Consequently, calls were made for the minimalist state. And, indeed, during the first half of the nineteenth century Britain embarked on the path that led to the minimalist mid-Victorian state, leaving the fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century behind. The end of the Napoleonic Wars marked the beginning of the dismantling or modernization of the British state apparatus, which up to that time had concentrated on one main task: maintaining its formidable war machine. To identify the minimalist state as the objective of reform, and to implement it, was all the easier as in the eighteenth century the British state at central level had taken on responsibility for a much narrower range of tasks than its continental counterparts. The characteristic features of this minimalist state, as they developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, included cheap government, low expenditures compared to other European states, good government, the general acceptance of rational standards of administrative efficiency, and a reluctance to interfere with property rights and market relations. Thus, Britain embarked upon a path which clearly deviated from that taken by other European states. Many of them – for example, the German states of the early nineteenth century – increasingly intervened in areas of domestic policy, such as education, the economy and social issues, and consequently, their state apparatuses expanded. This difference can be seen from a perspective which Thomas Ertman has introduced into the analysis of the history of the European states, albeit within a different timeframe. Ertman regards the category of timing as crucially important in the investigation of the state, arguing that the different patterns of state development in Europe are attributable to the time at which the respective administrative and fiscal systems were developed. There were ‘pioneers’ and ‘latecomers’ among the statebuilders. The latter had the advantage that they were able to learn from the mistakes made by the former, and could adopt the most recent technologies of government. From this perspective, the question arises as to whether the British state, whose history during the eighteenth century was, despite all its shortcomings, a success story, should be counted among the ‘pioneers’ who subsequently fell behind the ‘latecomers’ in the nineteenth century. To put it another way: was the minimalist state which was formed in Britain in reaction to the only semi-modernized Leviathan of the eighteenth century capable of doing what was required of it in the increasingly complex world of the nineteenth century?

FURTHER READING Baugh, Daniel: British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, NJ, 1965). Brewer, John: The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989). Brewer, John and Hellmuth, Eckhart (eds): Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany (Oxford, 1999). Downing, Brian: The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1992). Eastwood, David: Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997). Ertman, Thomas: The Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997).

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Harling, Philip: The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996). Harling, Philip: The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001). Harling, Philip and Mandler, Peter: ‘From “fiscal-military” state to laissez-faire state, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), pp. 44–70. Hintze, Otto: ‘Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung’ and ‘Machtpolitik und Regierungsverfassung’, in Hintze, Staat und Verfassung (Göttingen, 3rd edn, 1970), pp. 52–83 and pp. 424–56. Holmes, Geoffrey: Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680–1730 (London, 1982). Innes, Joanna: ‘The “mixed economy of welfare” in early modern England: assessments of the options from Hale to Malthus (c.1683–1803)’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), Charity, SelfInterest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996). Mathias, Peter and O’Brien, Patrick: ‘Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810’, Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), pp. 601–50. O’Brien, Patrick: ‘Public finance in the wars with France 1793–1815’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (London, 1989), pp. 165–87. O’Brien, Patrick: Power with Profit: The State and the Economy 1688–1815 (London, 1991). O’Brien, Patrick and Hunt, Philip A.: ‘The rise of a fiscal state in England, 1485–1815’, Historical Research, 66 (1993), pp. 129–76. Stone, Lawrence (ed.): An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994). Tilly, Charles: ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 169–91.

Chapter Three

Finance and Taxation Patrick Karl O’Brien

Military and Naval Expenditure on Strategic Policies Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 marked a decisive shift in favour of a more active and altogether more costly involvement in European and imperial power politics. To check the ambitions of France to hegemony in Europe and to extensive colonization overseas, as well as the French bid to secure and maintain competitive advantages in trade and commerce with the Americas, Africa and Asia, turned out to be unavoidably expensive. Between 1689 and 1803 Britain went to war with France and its allies seven times. Over what is referred to as the Second Hundred Years’ War intervals of cordiality, even alliance, marked relations between the two states, but while the power of Britain’s ‘natural and necessary enemy’ waxed and waned, it never ceased to threaten the security of the realm or the interests of the home economy until sometime after the famous defeats of Napoleon – first at sea at Trafalgar (1805), and then on land at Waterloo (1815). For most of the long eighteenth century (1688–1815) Britain was engaged in preparing for or demobilizing from war. The state’s defensive or aggressive stance in foreign, strategic, commercial and imperial policy cost a great deal of money which successive governments borrowed in the form of long-term loans or appropriated as taxes. For example, in real terms (i.e., measured in constant prices) the normal (or peacetime) expenditures climbed by a multiplier of three from around £2 million per annum in the mid-1680s to just over £6 million a century later. Wartime expenditures jumped by a factor of five, if we compare annual levels during King William’s (or the Nine Years’) War fought against Louis XIV (1689–97) with the war that finally defeated Napoleon (1803–15). Looked at and estimated in relative terms, the activities of the British state accounted for tiny proportions of national income before the Glorious Revolution and that ratio rose war after war to reach nearly a fifth during those years of intense conflict immediately before final victory at Waterloo. In long-term historical perspective the eighteenth century certainly marks a transformation in the levels of intervention and activity undertaken by the state in the affairs of the kingdom. Historians writing standard political histories of the period

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rarely offer interpretations or indicators of the changing significance that British monarchs, ministers, parliaments, politicians and civil servants have exercised in the economic and social life of the realm. Yet fiscal and budgetary data do allow us to appreciate and to mark discontinuities in the role of the state. For example, between the reigns of Henry VII and the outbreak of the civil wars (c.1485 to c.1642) the total sums collected as taxation for central or royal government remained roughly constant in real terms. There were some perceptible (but non-sustainable) upswings during the reign of Henry VIII. Most (up to 90 per cent) of the king’s revenues were allocated to fund military and naval expenditures, and to service loans incurred to pay for wars, although taxes invariably rose in wartime. By and large (on trend) the total amount of revenues collected for the state hardly changed over time. Since the population and national income of the realm almost certainly increased during the reigns of the Tudors and early Stuarts, this suggests that for some 150 years the burdens imposed on English taxpayers for central government probably diminished. Unlike its rivals in Europe, in fiscal and financial terms the English state displayed almost no capacity for expansion and active participation in great power politics or for more elaborate regulation of the domestic economy and society. That all changed under the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–60), when taxes began to rise discernibly above roughly the stationary levels re-established in the reign of Henry VII. Clearly, it took the singular circumstances of civil war and a republican interregnum to enlarge the English state. That extension in fiscal capacity was consolidated and stabilized after the restoration of the monarchy when the legal and administrative basis for a massive and sustained upswing in revenues (taxes, credit and loans) became institutionalized. This subsequently allowed and (possibly actively encouraged) the state, taken over by William III in 1688, to play a role in great power politics, colonization and international commerce that could not have been sustained under the Tudors and Stuarts. Between 1688 and 1815 Britain’s monarchs and their aristocratic supporters raised the fiscal and financial resources required to transform Britain’s geopolitical role in the world and to engage in seven major wars fought against France and its allies. When Castlereagh signed the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the by then United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland had emerged as the hegemonic naval power, possessed the largest occidental empire since Rome, enjoyed extraordinary shares of the profits from international trade in goods and services, and its economy was approximately half-way through the first industrial revolution. In early modern Europe states survived if they possessed sufficient and continuous command over the financial means necessary to defend their territories and citizens against external aggression and to meet internal challenges to their authority. To become more powerful in a universe of contending states and to validate their claims to regulate the presumed autonomy of families, corporations and institutions nominally under their jurisdiction, governments required ever-increasing amounts of revenue. Thus, a successful state can be recognized not merely by its continuity but because it mobilized the resources required for effective action in international relations as well as the force needed to meet domestic challenges to its sovereignty. Historians have recognized the obvious relationship between the power of states and the fiscal means at their disposal, but they are also aware that the connections were never that simple. For example, a 10 per cent increment in revenues rarely implied a

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proportionate increase in the state’s capacity for effective action. Generals and admirals notoriously squandered military resources placed at their disposal. Diplomacy usually proved to be cheaper and sometimes more useful than mobilization for war. Expenditure on bribery, favours, religious persuasion and the propagation of an ideology in support of royal and aristocratic rule cost less than the formal apparatus of coercion and intrusion into private domains, traditionally excluded from governmental control. Compliance with the laws and directives issued by central authorities (for all kinds of reasons unconnected with a state’s monopoly of coercion) could be secured more cheaply in some regions and among some populations than others. Nevertheless, in the long run, the relationship between fiscal resources and a capacity for sustained and effective action in the domestic and, above all, in the international spheres prevailed. Thus, the meta-question now addressed by this chapter is this: how did a small state (which endeavoured without conspicuous success to enlarge its fiscal and financial capacity for expenditure under the Tudors and Stuarts) manage to borrow enough money and raise the taxes required to defend the realm and to become so geopolitically and economically powerful among a universe of rival European states?

Taxation Since its capacity to borrow money (‘finance’) depended fundamentally on the state’s capacity to tax in order to meet regular contractual interest and amortization payments on its loans or accumulated debt, the core of any explanation must reside with the state’s success in selecting taxes and the effective implementation of tax policies, rather than with debt management as such. The establishment and evolution of an efficient system for credit and raising loans on the London capital market, however, also contributed to funding British participation in the sequence of wars the state engaged in between 1689 to 1815. The answer cannot be based on references to autonomous developments in the economic sphere. There is no simple correlation between the growth of the economy and the government’s fiscal achievement. Over this period British governments may well have ruled over the most rapidly growing of Europe’s competing national economies. That favourable evolution certainly carried whole sections of British society over thresholds of income and promoted patterns of expenditure, where purchases by households on goods and services began first to contribute and then (as private expenditures rose and diversified) to augment public income from indirect taxes. The concentration of households and producers in towns and regions not only increased taxable output flowing through organized markets, but also rendered the imposition and collection of taxes easier to administer. Nevertheless, data – which shows that Britain’s national product probably rose by a factor of three between 1688 and 1815, while tax receipts at the Exchequer multiplied around fifteen times – severely qualifies any suggestion which purports to explain fiscal success as a product of economic growth. Rising agricultural productivity, industrialization, urbanization and the reorganization of economic activities into larger firms located within denser zones of production helped, but these developments must be represented as ‘contributory’ factors and not as major forces behind the fiscal achievements of successive governments after 1688. Instead, that remarkable achievement (which eluded Tudor and Stuart monarchs constrained by a narrow and inflexible fiscal base) can

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only be accounted for as the outcome of a prior history of disengagement by rulers, of a cheaply protected island realm, from European power politics and wars of religion, and their measured detachment from imperialistic and commercial and colonizing ventures in the Americas, Asia and Africa. Somehow (perhaps more by necessity than foresight) England’s Tudor and Stuart dynasties avoided the proliferation of taxes and accumulation of royal debt that afflicted rival Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French powers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Coming late to European power politics and acting as a ‘free rider’ upon Iberian and Dutch investments in colonization and commerce overseas, the English state possessed (as Tudor and Stuart rulers long realized) untapped potential for taxation that the traumatic experience of civil war and an interlude of restored stability and institutional innovation brought on stream. In all essentials the foundations of the ‘fiscal state’ occurred before, not after, the Glorious Revolution. Its construction began during the 1630s when Charles I attempted to revalue his fiscal kingdom for purposes of direct taxation (and thus to provide the monarchy with a more secure basis for royal borrowing). That attempt led to costly civil wars (1642–8) when soldiers enforced the assessment of taxes levied upon the income and wealth of English families and when both parliament and the king imposed a wide range of new excise duties, many levied upon foodstuffs in mass consumption. After the war, indeed for something like four decades before 1688, the tradition of resistance to the state’s demand for money intensified and constrained the powers of the Cromwellian Commonwealth and Protectorate, as well as the restored Stuart monarchy, to widen and deepen the base for taxation and hence for loans, secured upon regular inflows of tax revenues. Nevertheless, the civil wars must be represented as a conjuncture in the realm’s fiscal as well as political history. As usual the necessities of war generated unpopular and resistible, as well as sustainable, innovations in the capacities of the state to levy taxes. For example, the attempts made by the king and by parliament to reassess the base, measured in terms of personal incomes or regional wealth, upon which universal and equitable styles of direct taxes might be levied had occasioned insurrection and revitalized a tradition of resistance to such intolerable innovations. Memories and myths surrounding three decades of violence and strife over taxation between the imposition of ship money and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 conditioned political attitudes to all forms of direct taxation before Pitt introduced an income tax, at a moment of crisis and threat to the security of the realm, in 1799. Experiments during the civil wars with a wide and innovatory range of excise duties had also been unpopular, but the principle that indirect taxes could be imposed upon goods and services produced within the realm had been conceded by parliament. Furthermore, that innovation had demonstrated that ‘duties’ levied on such commodities (as beer and liquors, salt, soap, starch, coal and minerals) could produce significant amounts of revenue for the Exchequer in London. After the Interregnum, when the English state sought to stabilize royal rule over one of the more lightly taxed societies in Europe, fiscal policies were formulated so as to rebuild trust in the constitution and take account of prospects for compliance with demands of revenue. Charles II and his ministers could do little more but engage seriously with the legal and administrative frameworks required to maintain, and if possible gradually increase, the amount of revenue collected in the more acceptable

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form of indirect taxes, particularly customs duties. After 1660 parliament replaced all but a small range of the more productive excise duties, but provided for new valuations and rates of duty levied upon a wide range of imports. Ministers and their advisers at the Treasury concentrated upon the rules framing the operations of a largely privatized administration for the assessment and collection of indirect taxes levied upon imports as well as a limited range of domestic production. Revenues from indirect taxes continued (as had been the practice for centuries) to be farmed out to private individuals or syndicates under a variety of complex contractual arrangements, designed to ensure stable flows of income into the Exchequer year after year. Tax farming offered restored Stuart monarchs an alternative to royal bureaucracy, which was seen as open to antagonism and political interference from parliament, a prey to corruption and prone to prefer patrimonial to the king’s fiscal and financial interests. For the king’s purposes the devolution of the administration of taxes into the hands of business syndicates also provided (as it did in Europe before the evolution of modern markets for capital) an institutional mechanism for borrowing money. In common with their continental rivals English monarchs expected to borrow on the security of tax revenues that accrued in the first instance to their agents or farmers. For their part, tax farmers stood prepared not only to manage the assessment and collection of taxes but to risk investing their own and (through networks of affluent clients) other people’s money in the form of loans to the crown, because repayments, with interest, could be guaranteed and deducted from the fixed annual rents (i.e., taxes) which they contracted to deliver to the Exchequer. Farming the royal customs worked best when the kingdom’s foreign trade remained free from cyclical downswings and unimpeded by warfare at sea. Farming excise taxes levied on domestic production became equally problematic whenever the economy suffered from recessions connected with bad harvests, plagues or business cycles. At such times tax farmers often submitted claims for defalcations on their contracts to deliver fixed annual sums as rents on tax farms which they found to be subject to unpredictable fluctuations in the amounts of taxation collected upon trade and production. Yet, whenever they failed to offer stable revenues, a major rationale for the franchised assessment and collection of taxes weakened. When tax farmers made inflated demands for their knowledge and services, the case for a public service became stronger. That occurred in 1670 when Charles II and his ministers found themselves in protracted dispute with a powerful syndicate over terms for the renewal of the lease for customs duties. Apparently, the tax farmers rashly offended the king by demanding prior commitments about defalcations allowable in the event of another war with the Dutch. Unwilling to concede that ‘monied men’ could raise questions about royal policy, ministers cancelled the contract, repaid loans, put into place and depended thereafter upon the state’s own customs service for the assessment and collection of duties on imports. Tax farming survived, however, for another twelve years for excises. Their gross yields had risen steadily throughout the 1660s and 1670s and the tight system of surveillance, provided for under short leases supervised by commissioners for the excise, meant that the royal ministers took every opportunity to squeeze excess profits out of farmers. Step by step the collection of the excise evolved into a single great

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farm managed by London merchants and financiers – who in effect operated as agents for the Treasury and who also provided loans and credit on the security of forthcoming revenues. Yet, whenever their profits diminished, farmers cut costs and thereby failed to bring the maximum potential volume of production into the net for taxation. They then attempted to ‘recoup’ by demanding higher rates of interest for the loans they had contracted to extend in anticipation of future flows of excise duties. As the potential gap between net revenues obtainable from a privatized compared to the public management of taxes narrowed, arguments from the Treasury for direct collection became economically compelling. Indeed, that also came to pass at a time when the political distinction, between a ‘metropolitan clique’ of tax farmers on the one hand and a royal bureaucracy on the other, lost its historical significance even for opponents of royal power. Meanwhile, decades of surveillance and negotiation with farmers of customs and excise duties had provided the Treasury and the commissioners of customs and excise with opportunities to monitor the practices of private management and to absorb both know-how about, as well as many of the personnel involved in, the assessment and collection of first customs and later excise duties into departments of state. Thereafter, both departments evolved. The excise rapidly and the customs falteringly and imperfectly developed into bodies of government servants, who matured by standards of the day into relatively effective agencies for the collection of indirect taxes. Thus, by the time William of Orange secured the throne in 1688, the fiscal system had been reconstructed and can be represented as politically primed and administratively poised to support the accumulation of debt required to sustain the armed forces of the crown through the sequence of major wars fought against France and its allies over the next 127 years. Immediately before James II fled to France the Stuart regime appropriated only 3 to 4 per cent of the national income as taxes, spent some £2 million a year on the army and navy, and carried a tiny royal debt of roughly the same amount. Shortly after Britain’s final victory over France at Waterloo in 1815, peacetime taxation had risen by a multiplier of fifteen, compared with James II’s brief reign, and the state serviced a national debt which then amounted to nearly three times the national income – a ratio remarkable even by the most profligate standards of debt accumulation undertaken by the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties to achieve their ambitions in Europe and overseas before and after 1648; or even by the Dutch Republic struggling throughout its golden age to gain and preserve its independence between 1568 and 1795. Politically primed means that after the civil wars, ministers of the crown reluctantly abandoned serious attempts to make taxes on income and wealth more productive, either by revaluing the base upon which they were assessed or by extending the range and numbers of households brought into the government’s net for direct taxation. Policies designed to revalue the wealth of counties, cities, towns, villages, hundreds and households (envisaged in the attempt by Charles I to extend ship money across the kingdom and exemplified by regular universalistic and more equitable assessments undertaken under the Commonwealth) had left behind a memory and a heritage of popular and parliamentary antagonism to any system of direct taxation based upon the accurate measurement of income and wealth, either of the households and/or the districts liable to pay taxes to kings and their parliaments. Only very traditional forms of direct taxes collected as quotas, assessed on counties and towns, in relative

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proportions that had hardly changed since the Middle Ages, remained acceptable to taxpayers. These stereotyped quotas, together with control by local elites over the process of assessment and collection, formed the basis for a moderately productive land tax, which persisted in unaltered form from 1694 to 1798. Other (and widely resented) experiments with ‘graduated’ poll and hearth taxes assessed in wartime under the later Stuarts and by William III in the 1690s disappeared after 1697. No new and potentially controversial direct taxes emerged before William Pitt’s income tax came onto the statute book in 1799. Before that innovation appeared, kings and parliaments could prescribe and legislate, but freeborn propertied Englishmen insisted on keeping the state ignorant about their real levels of income and wealth and set terms for cooperation and compliance by retaining control over the administration of land and all other forms of directly assessed taxation. To circumvent these political constraints and to avoid any threats to political stability ministers and their advisers turned towards the improvement of legal, institutional and administrative frameworks required to collect rising proportions of revenue in the form of customs and excise duties. That development had proceeded some way by the early seventeenth century; received impetus from the civil wars and Interregnum; and came fully on stream over the century after 1713 when something like three-quarters of all tax revenues received by successive British governments took the form of indirect taxes and when most of the increment to the state’s income from taxation consisted of excises and stamp duties levied upon the domestic production of goods and services.

War Finance and the Accumulation of the National Debt For most of the period (1688–1815) when Britain was emerging as Europe’s hegemonic naval and imperial power, the state did not control a tax system that was reliable or elastic enough to fund abrupt transitions from peacetime to augmented wartime expenditures. The bulk of extra taxation raised in wartime came from raising the rate of taxation levied from 5 per cent to 20 per cent on a stereotyped valuation of real property. Extra taxation was, however, never sufficient to fund the forces of the crown when fully mobilized for warfare and therefore the raising of loans was needed to circumvent that critical problem. Although proportions of the extra money raised as taxes in order to engage in armed conflict varied from war to war (it reached 50 per cent in King William’s War, 1689–97, and again during the Napoleonic War, 1803–15), the bulk of funds came from long-term or perpetual loans. Although chancellors of the Exchequer (before Pitt the Younger changed the policy) borrowed most of the money needed to support the mobilization of the armed forces, they imposed indirect taxes to meet interest payments on short-term (unfunded) and above all on perpetual (funded) national debt raised for the expenses of seven wars (1689–97, 1702–13, 1739–48, 1756–63, 1775–83, 1793–1802, 1803–15) fought by Britain’s armies and navies. Over the long eighteenth century and the final phase of Europe’s mercantilist era, the accumulation of Britain’s national debt mounted in line with the state’s augmented capacities to tax and pay interest on loans from extra revenues derived largely from indirect taxes. From a ratio of 24 per cent during that brief interlude of peace (1698–1702), the share of the total tax receipts allocated to service the national debt mounted, conflict after conflict, to reach some 60 per cent after

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the Napoleonic War (1803–15). War after war, as the state exploited its growing potential to borrow funds to support a far more aggressive stance in great power politics, Britain moved from the foot to the apex of the European league table for government indebtedness. Again unsurprisingly (and in line with histories of its European rivals who had participated more actively in geopolitics and colonization over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Britain’s fiscal and financial system passed through but (unlike France, Spain and the Dutch Republic) weathered three serious fiscal and financial crises of the state. The first occurred in the wake of the American War of Independence (1775–83), when Pitt the Younger introduced a sinking fund designed and accepted by parliament as a permanent commitment to redeem systematically the national debt, which had accumulated in the perceptions of the political elite to a dangerous sum outstanding and which in their view threatened the fiscal system, the stability of the constitution and the prosperity of the economy. Similar perceptions, also accompanied by widespread despondency, marked the renewed and even more rapid accumulation of public debt during the war against Revolutionary France from 1793 to 1802. To preserve the financial system while providing funds to meet the rising costs of war and to defeat threats to property from Revolutionary France, Pitt persuaded parliament in 1799 to accept his novel strategy of paying for considerably higher proportions of military and naval expenditure from the proceeds of the nation’s first real income tax. Sixteen years later, and after the most costly conflict in Britain’s history when (and despite the clear success of Pitt’s income tax) the nominal value of national debt amounted to more than double the national income, Lord Liverpool’s administration began the task of rebuilding trust in the fiscal constitution, basically by rolling back the state.

Conclusions: Fiscal and Financial Success England (Europe’s most successful fiscal state which emulated several features of Dutch fiscal and fundamental policy) began its irresistible rise after the Glorious Revolution. Between 1689 and 1815 allocations of tax revenues to service a national debt (maturing into the largest in Europe and accumulating to preserve the security of the realm and to carry the state and the economy to positions of naval, imperial, commercial and industrial hegemony) emanated in very large proportion from excise and customs duties. In strictly constitutional terms, the selection of these allimportant indirect taxes, the rules prescribed for their assessment and collection, and ultimate control over the departments responsible for the implementation of the laws covering all duties levied on commodities and services fell under the sovereignty of parliament. In political practice the provision of supply for the armed forces of the crown (particularly when British armies and navies were at war), and for the administration of laws and the institutional frameworks required to augment the armed forces, required inflows of revenue into London that remained virtually under the control of an aristocratic oligarchy of Hanoverian ministers reporting to their monarchs. With a state so often at war, parliament almost never refused or hardly ever even cut royal demands for money. For centuries, as an island with a small presence in imperial ventures overseas, Britain came late to serious participation in European power politics and coloniza-

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tion. After the Glorious Revolution its state arrived on that scene unencumbered by debt, with an underexploited fiscal base and with an aristocratic and monarchical regime that maintained a strong degree of autonomy, in the formulation of its commercial, imperial and fiscal policies, by remaining aloof from its dispersed and heterogeneous bodies of taxpayers and creditors, even while it taxed and accumulated debt on an extraordinary scale. British exceptionalism in this vital domain of fiscal and financial power had something but rather little to do with the Glorious Revolution, parliaments, liberty and democracy, and owed far more to the construction between 1642 and 1684 of an efficient framework for taxation that subsequently allowed, after 1688, for a massive accumulation of debt that carried the realm through seven wars to reach a pinnacle of power the United Kingdom retained throughout a ‘golden age’ of Victorian and Edwardian liberal capitalism. In retrospect, most of the advantages enjoyed by the Hanoverian state flowed from geographical endowments; the detachment or weakness of the Tudor and Stuart regimes in geopolitics; and above all from the fiscal sclerosis that afflicted Britain’s major competitors on the European mainland between 1689 and 1815. The inexorable onset of sclerosis (that had also clearly afflicted Britain’s fiscal and financial system for several decades after Waterloo) led only to an era of laissez-faire governments. Fortunately, and for more than a century, the rollback of the state did not seriously compromise the Victorian regimes’ exercise of hegemony – basically because the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France had exhausted the capacities of Britain’s major rivals to challenge its imperial, economic and geopolitical position in the world economy.

FURTHER READING Bonney, Richard (ed.): Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995). Braddick, M. J.: The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996). Brewer, John: The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1989). Chandaman, C. D.: The English Public Revenue 1660–1688 (Oxford, 1975). Dickson, P. M. G.: The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London, 1967). Dietz, Frederick C.: English Public Finance 1558–1641 (London, 1932). Hoffman, Philip T. and Norberg, Kathryn (eds): Fiscal Crises, Liberty and Representative Government (Stanford, CA, 1994). Hoon, Elizabeth E.: The Organization of the English Customs System 1696–1786 (New York, 1938). O’Brien, P. K.: ‘The political economy of British taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 41 (1988), pp. 1–32. O’Brien, P. K.: ‘Public finance in the wars with France 1793–1815’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (London, 1989), pp. 165–87. O’Brien, P. K.: ‘Central government and the economy 1688–1815’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 205–41.

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O’Brien, P. K. and Hunt, P. A.: ‘England 1485–1815’, in R. Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 53–101. O’Brien, P. K. and Hunt, P. A.: ‘Excises and the rise of a fiscal state in England, 1586–1688’, in Mark Ormrod et al. (eds), Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History (Stanford, CA, 1999). Roseveare, Henry: The Treasury: The Evolution of a British Institution (London, 1969). Roseveare, Henry: The Financial Revolution, 1660–1760 (London, 1991). Stone, Lawrence (ed.): An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994).

Chapter Four

Local Government and Local Society David Eastwood

Misreading the Eighteenth Century Local society and particularly local government in eighteenth-century Britain has often been misrepresented. This was an age of oligarchy, when the currency of public life was patronage, repaid in the small change of deference. Landed acres, increasingly manicured and stylized, were a grand metaphor for effortless control by a landed elite. Squires and parsons ruled rural areas with a comfortable complacency, whilst variously growing affluence or genteel decline led to an atrophying of urban government. Walpole’s ‘Venetian oligarchy’ held provincial England in its thrall even more completely than it had subordinated parliament. The nearest the twentieth century came to an official history of Britain was the Oxford History of England. For half a century the eighteenth-century episode in this essentially Whiggish national history was captured in Basil Williams’s The Whig Supremacy 1715–1760 (1939), which held its place until a new wave of scholarship broke with the publication of Paul Langford’s successor volume, A Polite and Commercial People, in 1983. Williams’s picture of local government was puzzlingly dismissive. Provincial institutions and the fabric of local life represented ‘an historical scrap book’. England was governed by ‘various haphazard methods’, which could not be ‘dignified with the name of a system’. On the ground there was an ‘amazing hotch-potch of authorities and conflicting jurisdictions’ which, in the main, were overseen by men drawn from a ‘half-educated class’. The powers of the parish had been ‘whittled away’ and the authority, or ‘local despotism’, of the justice of the peace now held sway over parish and county. Even urban government had fallen prey to the ‘immense power’ of the justices of the peace. Moreover, and perhaps most culpably, central government had abrogated its influence in the localities. Relations between central and local government were incoherent, and although parliament sometimes amended or enhanced the role of local government, in essence a petty tyranny was being exercised over petty matters. The history of local government could thus be told in terms of the public activities of ‘largely irresponsible’ justices of the peace. A few ‘vestiges’ of an older representative culture aside, the provinces enjoyed no public life.

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It is odd and revealing that this caricature of the eighteenth century became so deep rooted. Odd because many of the eighteenth century’s most distinctive voices told a different story; revealing because this old orthodoxy represented the triumph of very particular political and historiographical traditions. Henry Fielding, that most brilliantly acute of eighteenth-century novelists, found lurking in the vestries of provincial England, ‘schemes . . . which would hardly disgrace a conclave. Here are plots and circumventions, parties and factions, equal to those which are to be found in the courts’. One could here pile quotation upon quotation, tincturing the eighteenth century as a period of almost democratic vitality. The young Frenchman, François de la Rochefoucauld, travelling in East Anglia in 1784, found the administration of justice in provincial England deserving of ‘the highest commendation’. Justices of the peace were men of ‘the highest reputation’, parish constables were ‘held in high respect’ by the people, whilst farmers adjudicated cases as jurors uninfluenced by ‘any personal motive’ and with ‘the closest attention’. England thus achieved a kind of ‘democracy’ which avoided the ‘unpleasant features of democracy such as factions, risings and so on’. But gathering a small harvest of such quotations does not demonstrate a case by mere weight of accumulation. There are counterexamples as richly etched as a Hogarth print. They merely demonstrate that the eighteenth-century self-image was more complex than some historians’ caricatures allow. What is more important is the political use and historiographical abuse of the eighteenth century. This has deep and specific historical roots and has only been dispelled very recently. The roots of this parody of eighteenth-century government and public institutions lie in the eighteenth century itself. From the 1780s a reform movement gathered momentum, and this movement developed a language and a programme which highlighted ‘abuses’ and advocated a very different way of ordering society and its local institutions. Beginning with the movement for ‘economical reform’ in the 1780s and intensified by the more democratic radicalism of the 1790s, reformers developed a critique of the politics of influence, connection and traditional authority. Interestingly this movement had roots in provincial England itself, as Christopher Wyvill’s Association Movement built on its Yorkshire base to develop a nationwide organization. This radical tradition came to decry ‘old corruption’. Much of the critique of old corruption was elaborated around the politics of Westminster, the growth of pensions, and the machinery of William Pitt’s highly effective governmental regime. Nevertheless local politics – whether evidenced by the politics of elections, the composition of the commission of the peace, or the intrusion of the church into civil administration through clerical magistrates and clerical chairs of parish vestries – offered a useful second front for reformers. The apparently oligarchic interweaving of local politics and parliamentary corruption was chronicled in remorseless detail in T. H. B. Oldfield’s History of the Boroughs of Great Britain (2 vols, 1794) and his Representative History of Great Britain (6 vols, 1816). Add William Cobbett’s heroically sustained invective against old corruption and the Euclidean certainties of utilitarian reformers, and an awesome critique of the historically informed improvisations of eighteenth-century Britain’s local administration was born. What had begun as the oppositional denunciations of Hanoverian radicals became the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century reformers. Parliamentary committees and

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royal commissions from the 1830s teemed with colourful accounts of abuse, incompetence and administrative incoherence. These were marshalled in support of reforming initiatives, whether these aimed to transform the poor law, improve the prisons, raise standards of public health or ensure that the streets were properly policed. Once parliament had been reformed in 1832, the logic, or rather the ideological priorities, which had carried the Great Reform Act were applied to a still more radical overhaul of local government. Carrying these reforms through took much of the nineteenth century. The style of reform changed between the 1830s and the 1880s and 1890s, when county government and parish administration were finally reformed. Nevertheless, one recurrent leitmotiv remained: a searing indictment of eighteenth-century administration. The commissions, especially those on poor law (1834), municipal corporations (1842) and public health (1842, 1843–5), provided a rich quarry for later historians. Happily guided by Whig and liberal certainties, late Victorian and early twentiethcentury historical orthodoxy found abundant proofs of the eighteenth century’s failings in the great nineteenth-century official inquiries, and thus what had begun as a radical critique became a fixed historical orthodoxy. There were dissenting voices, although interestingly these were often non-English voices. The Prussian jurist Rudolph von Gneist in the 1880s celebrated the eighteenth century’s decentralizing tendencies. In 1913 Elie Halévy began his survey of the early nineteenth century by discovering, in his retrospect on eighteenth-century local government, ‘the administrative socialism of bygone England’. Yet the mainstream flowed down quite different ideological valleys. Between 1906 and 1929 Sidney and Beatrice Webb produced a nine-volume History of English Local Government, whose centre of gravity was an extended survey of eighteenth-century irrationalities and a celebration of the nineteenth century’s reforming endeavours. Conservative historians had less reason to castigate the eighteenth century, but for a variety of reasons averted their gaze from its local institutions and provincial political culture. Parliament, economic progress, metropolitan culture, rather than local institutions and the provinces, were at the centre of more celebratory accounts of Hanoverian England. Moreover, when Lewis Namier published his Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929 a long shadow was cast across the history of the eighteenth century. A simultaneously brilliant, acute and partial reading of eighteenth-century politics, Namier’s book became, for nearly half a century, the lens through which the eighteenth century was examined. For Namier patronage, clientage and control were the instruments of power and the currency of politics. Despite critics, Namier carried much before him, and his reading of the eighteenth century was made flesh when the History of Parliament began its work in the 1950s. Other historians, who had little sympathy with Namierite politics, found Namierite history served them well. E. P. Thompson, who spoke for a generation of radical historians with and after his publication of The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, offered a reading of the eighteenth century full of Namierite themes and nuances. Namier might marvel at a politics of clientage and control whilst Thompson might be repelled by a politics of old corruption, but both were recognizably commenting on the same historical landscape. The transformation in our understanding of the eighteenth century began in the 1970s and gathered pace in the 1980s. This new history of the eighteenth century

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is too varied and vibrant to be simply characterized. It has at its core a much more subtle and responsive reading of eighteenth-century politics; a much more vibrant reading of eighteenth-century society and social policy; and a fresh understanding of the nature and trajectory of economic change. For our purposes, though, some other themes can be discerned in this new work. The first is an appreciation that what happened in eighteenth-century Britain happened to a significant degree because of rather than in spite of its public institutions. The second is a recognition that we need to take the eighteenth century’s self-evaluation seriously, and that, if the eighteenth century thought of itself as anything, it thought of itself as a period of ‘improvement’. Moreover, the theatres of improvement were often, one might even argue predominantly, local institutions and local communities. The century teemed with improvement commissions, local acts to turnpike roads or cut canals, and considerable investment in improving the lot of the poor, the treatment of prisoners and the treatment of the sick. Local government and locally based institutions took the lead in much of this. If we understand that the eighteenth century thought of itself as an age of improvement, whilst historians have chosen to accord this accolade to the nineteenth century, we will understand a good deal.

A Complex Inheritance It is now a historical commonplace to see England as ‘a long formed state’. In the eighteenth century many, though not all, came to venerate Britain’s venerable political institutions. Conservatives such as William Blackstone wove his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9) around an explanation and a celebration of England’s long developed legal and judicial system. When the revolutionary storm broke over Europe after 1789 a chorus of conservative voices extolled England’s (for they usually spoke of England) ancient institutions as a bulwark against this rising tide of revolutionary upheaval. Thus, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was at least as much a panegyric to England’s historically refined constitution as it was an exploration of the nature of the crisis of the French monarchy. Radicals took a more sceptical view and by the close of the century had elaborated a connected critique of central and local government. Nevertheless, the strength of British institutions and the mobilization of a British nation in the face of the French revolutionary threat meant that the eighteenth century ended with serious structural reform still a generation away. It is striking that the institutions of English local government were still more antique than those of central government. Parliament is a late medieval innovation, but the shires and hundreds into which England was divided and the sheriffs, justices and county officers who exercised power within these jurisdictions were older than parliament itself. Shires and hundreds were indeed a hardy legacy of the AngloSaxon state. Sheriffs too were first appointed in the eleventh century. Justices of the peace, by name at least, were comparatively recent, first so called in 1351, although their role has deeper roots. Indeed the legal structures of assizes and sessions were a legacy of Henry II’s systematic reform of the English law. Towns too could trace their incorporations back to the medieval period, with the curious consequence by the eighteenth century that the pattern of municipal government – those places which enjoyed incorporated status – reflected an earlier pattern of power, patronage and

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prosperity. The new wealth which the eighteenth century witnessed was, in the main, generated by new centres such as Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield which, in constitutional terms, remained no more than villages. By contrast to England, Britain was a new state, fashioned in 1707 through a complex interplay of English and Scottish ambitions. One might have expected the coming together of two states, with distinct cultures and distinct institutions, to have created the impetus for a thoroughgoing reform of political institutions. By 1707 it had become clear that a union could be concluded which fused parliamentary institutions, but which left other public institutions, including the church and local government, unaltered and different north and south of the border. Thus, throughout the eighteenth century, Scotland continued not only with a system of local government which differed from that of England, but those differences became further accentuated when and after heritable jurisdictions were abolished in 1747 as part of the response to the 1745 rebellion. The appointment of sheriffs’ deputies in 1748 gave the centre a larger role in Scottish local government than it enjoyed or sought south of the border. Scotland possessed justices of the peace before the Act of Union, and the union certainly animated a magisterial system that was much less energetic than its English counterpart. The greater role enjoyed in poor relief by the church, the particular traditions of the Highlands, and the gradual development of a new culture of local administration after 1748 preserved clear differences between the English and Scottish experiences after the union. Union with Wales had taken place much earlier, with Acts of Union in 1536 and 1543 producing quite different results. Wales was assimilated to England and, with one exception, Welsh local government by the eighteenth century formally mirrored that of England. Indeed, in the parts of Wales which had easy access to England, both the structures and the operation of local government mirrored those of England, although sometimes, as in Pembrokeshire, with the twist of an Englishspeaking governing elite exercising power over a Welsh-speaking peasantry. In places nearer to the border, such as Glamorgan, the pattern was less distinctive. In remoter regions, Wales was a less-governed country, with some parts of north Wales having no effective poor law and a weak system of parish administration. What Wales did have, until 1830, was its Court of Great Sessions, the one Welsh institution that had survived the ruthless assimilation of Wales following the Acts of Union. The Great Sessions gave Wales a distinctive and cheap system of justice, although by the eighteenth century it was defended more zealously in west Wales than by landowners in the east. Once serious reform of the English courts began in 1826 its demise was assured and no account was taken of its significance as a national, as distinct from a legal, body. Thus, the newly formed British state worked with the historically accumulated tools of local government. There were some reforming initiatives but no drive for modernization. In this Britain, and British unionism, was distinct. Many other major European states embarked on systematic reforms of their local government system, either to absorb newly acquired territories, or better to assimilate more remote or independent territories, or to improve the administration of their lands. The Prussians for example reformed local government in 1733 and again after 1749. For much of the second half of the century their legal system was being codified, a task which was not finally complete until 1794. The Habsburgs reformed local govern-

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ment three times: after 1749, after 1760, and between 1781 and 1789. French local government was remodelled with almost geometric precision after the Revolution, whilst a host of minor states emulated the reforming endeavours of their larger counterparts. The European enlightenment was preoccupied with questions of governance. If one adds the American Revolution and subsequent constitution making, where relations between centre and locality were at the heart of the debate, what is striking about eighteenth-century Britain is that there was no attempt to reform its complex local government inheritance. The British way was to innovate within and around existing institutions, but not to innovate on them. It would be wrong to suppose that no developments had occurred in local government since the medieval period. Many of the major municipal incorporations occurred between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The parish, an ancient ecclesiastical unit, became a unit of secular administration in the Elizabethan period, notably through the acts of 1597 and 1601 which established the parish as a rating unit and gave it responsibility for the relief of the poor. The crucial relationship between parliament and the localities was renegotiated and redefined in the early modern period, and was not finally settled until the Revolution Settlement of 1689–94. By the eighteenth century, though, the period of structural or constitutional alteration was at an end. Although they disagreed as to its political meanings, most of the politically active agreed that the Revolution Settlement was something to work with rather than against. If we reflect on this, a central paradox emerges. The eighteenth century is a period of little formal innovation in the structures of political life, and yet it is a period that often presents itself in innovatory terms. Improvement and innovation were at the heart of Hanoverian Britain’s self-perception. In retrospect the eighteenth century was a period of profound economic change and considerable social development. The coexistence of an essentially conservative constitutional perspective and a dynamic society seems puzzling. The puzzle is resolved if we appreciate that the formal constitution of Britain’s political institutions does not describe, or circumscribe, the vitality of its public life. As we will see, innovation took place both within and around these public institutions, notably the institutions of local government. Moreover, the political culture that animated local government, an active local elite assuming a public role, remained and indeed was renewed in the eighteenth century. Finally, in important ways the reforming spirit which often found itself at odds with parliament over parliamentary reform by the late eighteenth century found scope and expression in a flowering of local government and local improvement. In remarkable ways the new wine of reform found its way into the old wineskins of England’s local political institutions.

Local Government at Work: Participation and Improvement People animated local government in eighteenth-century Britain. Where officers lacked energy, institutions ossified and power was haphazardly, even arbitrarily, exercised; when officers had energy and imagination antique institutions acquired new vitality, even new vision. The abuses of eighteenth-century local government were abundantly chronicled in nineteenth-century official enquiries and Whiggish histories in the twentieth century. The personal administration of justice as of

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political power could be, indeed was, idiosyncratic, but idiosyncrasy erred on the side of indulgence as well as arbitrary excess. Moreover, and this is critical, eighteenthcentury Britain was not an intensely governed country. Government expenditure was modest, and taxation and public borrowing were dominated by what historians have lately come to call the ‘fiscal-military state’. War, imperial defence and the civil establishment absorbed the majority of public spending. In 1748–50, for example, expenditure by parishes and counties in England and Wales, averaging £730,000, amounted to a shade under 6.8 per cent of total public spending. Similarly, the rate of criminal indictments and criminal convictions was low. The Oxfordshire quarter sessions in the 1780s averaged only around ten committals a year for theft, and though the rate was higher in counties with larger urban populations such as Surrey, indictments for crime were very low by modern standards. These patterns would begin to change in the last quarter of the century, but it is important to understand both the rationale for the Hanoverian system and the political culture of those who made the system work. The people in Hanoverian Britain were fond of what they took to be their liberties. Idiomatically, English liberties invoked a sense of an ancient inheritance and a contrast with the officialdom that was widely taken to hold the peoples of Europe in thrall to despotic government. The French, Habsburg and Prussian states had their officials, often centrally appointed, sometimes uniformed, and certainly formally accountable to the centre. England, by contrast, had voluntary officers, elected officials, ad hoc commissions. Attempts to introduce a regular police, like attempts to number the people, were defeated in defence of a prized liberty and scepticism about intensive government. Those who wanted to reform or enhance key resources of state power, notably policing, had to work within existing provision or elaborate a quasivoluntary provision alongside it. John and Henry Fielding, the great London police reformers, offer a cameo of ideology, tradition and reform in the mid-century. Henry Fielding inveighed against ‘wild notions of liberty’ which explained the ‘present lethargic state’ of public authorities, whilst still opposing ‘pernicious’ schemes of European-style police reform. The Fieldings used the authority of their office as magistrates at the Bow Street police office to institute small-scale police reforms from the 1750s. The Bow Street runners achieved a reputation beyond their tiny numbers, and a horse-patrol foundered for lack of funding. Nevertheless this modelled a way forward for many localities, who improved local services through voluntary endeavour, establishing paid watches and mutual-insurance associations to defray the costs of prosecutions. The quest to uphold liberty and enhance efficacy led to numerous experiments and over the course of the next century to a remodelling of the relationship between state and the citizen. The smallest and most pervasive unit of local government was the parish vestry. Most vestries still met in churches, proclaiming the institution’s ecclesiastical origins and reminding villagers that God and Caesar had been married by the English state. The vestry came of age as a secular body when it was given rating power by the acts of 1597 and 1601. This was critical to the development of local government in Britain, giving local authorities power of primary taxation and responsibility for providing for the poor. Until acts of 1818 and 1819 there were few regulatory orders for the vestry. Minutes did not have to be kept, and memory rather than the written record was the currency of business. All ratepayers were entitled to attend and vote

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in vestries, the most extensive electorate in Britain. In some larger cities, notably London, vestry meetings could be large and boisterous, with larger ratepayers claiming they were outvoted by the smaller ratepayers whose voting rights were disproportionate to their modest fiscal contributions. In rural parishes it was easier to moderate the political authority of the smaller ratepayers by de-rating them. Power here resided with officials. The key officers were the two overseers of the poor, elected annually, and the two churchwardens, one usually elected and one nominated by the incumbent. Parishes also had responsibility for local roads, and elected a surveyor of the highways. Parishes could use rate income for highway repairs, and could oblige parishioners to work on highway maintenance. Parish constables were formally appointed each year, an appointment ratified by magistrates, but many served yearon-year, receiving fees for services performed, and thus quasi-professional. To the majority of people the only institution of the state they encountered was the vestry. There was an intense pattern of migration in the eighteenth century, driven by economic imperatives and the itinerant labouring gangs at harvest, but this was mostly local migration. In every village there was the vestry, the constable and the overseers. These local elites embodied public authority, and the primary distinction throughout the country was between those who held local office, and might also serve on juries, and those who did not. Richard Gough’s famous account of the Shropshire village of Myddle in 1701 is ordered around who occupied which pew in the parish church – a visible political geography. Those who ran the parishes, paid the rates, defined entitlement to poor relief, employed most local labour and filled the benches of juries were, in an authentic and pervasive sense, a governing class. By the end of the eighteenth century perhaps as many as 400,000 people, including some women ratepayers, could attend parish vestries and constituted the pool from which parish officers were elected, a different and bigger electorate than that for parliamentary elections. If the parish vestry rested on a rather idiosyncratic kind of representative principle, the government of the counties was improvised around the politics of patronage and a highly personal notion of power and status. Here land and power were firmly fused. An act of 1732 fixed the property qualification for being named on the commission of the peace at £100. In most counties the numbers named on the commission of the peace exceeded 200, and amounted to a roll call of the county elite, and the number formally named on the commissions of the peace rose from around 3,000 in 1714 to over 7,000 by 1761. The majority of those named, though, regarded this as a status rather than a responsibility. A much smaller number were active magistrates, in many counties perhaps no more than thirty. Amongst these active magistrates were an increasing number of clerical magistrates. During the intense party political upheavals associated with the 1689–1714 period, commissions of the peace were constantly being remodelled as part of the collateral of party conflicts in parliament and the country. This kind of turbulence disturbed the routine work of local administration. After 1714 justices of the peace found the space and stability to develop county government. Justices of the peace operated in two theatres: the petty sessions and the quarter sessions. Petty sessions represented the fusion of personal and judicial power at its most intense. Justices dispensed justice from their parlours, held summary sessions in inns and other public places, and decided, often without reference even to a clerk,

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the outcomes of cases. Summary justice was in their gift, as were its punishments in terms of fines, corporal punishments and, increasingly as the century progressed, imprisonment. More serious offences, from major thefts through offences against the person, to conspiracies and organized crimes, were committed to the higher courts of quarter sessions and assizes. Much judicial business was, however, done in petty sessions. Active magistrates might be clerics such as Reverend Edmund Tew in County Durham, landowners such as William Hunt in Wiltshire, or political notables such as Samuel Whitbread in Bedfordshire, all of whose justicing notebooks have survived. They would generally hold formal sessions either fortnightly or monthly, and would transact other business as and when matters pressed. The more assiduous, too, would use their powers to exercise a significant degree of oversight over parish officers. The magistrates’ achievement was to weld their judicial, licensing and administrative powers into something that operated as a system. The key here was the quarter sessions, which focused, regularized and ritualized magistrates’ authority. The quarter sessions were the quarterly meeting of magistrates, along with juries, constituted as a higher court. As the eighteenth century progressed, these quarterly meetings, which generally lasted three days, came to act as the occasion when the county assembled as a social and political entity. Balls, parties, public sermons and court rituals animated especially the first day of the quarter sessions. Those arraigned before the court were treated to rituals of power which ranged from high constables of the hundreds presenting white gloves as ‘emblems of purity’ betokening no indicted crime in their jurisdictions, through to court officers and court customs which proclaimed the magistracy of the law and the majesty of the magistrates who embodied it. As so often in British state formation, the quarter sessions were an institution whose role had evolved and mutated. The court had its officers, the most important of which was the clerk of the peace. An ancient office, invariably held by a lawyer, it was rewarded by a system of fees. Many clerks, certainly by the later part of the century, were in effect full-time county officials. Acton Chaplain, clerk of the peace in Buckinghamshire, for example, also held the offices of county treasurer and deputy lieutenant clerk to the lord lieutenant between 1787 and 1813. Elsewhere, the county treasurership was held separately, often by a banker. A county surveyor was appointed with nominal responsibility for county bridges, and when men such as Thomas Telford held the office genuine expertise was available. County sheriffs, who were ‘pricked’ but in practice served in an honorific rotation, formally had responsibility for the county’s gaols. Magistrates themselves had the power to hear appeals from paupers and ratepayers aggrieved at receiving too little or paying too much for poor relief. When one adds to this powers to monitor and regulate migration, responsibility for licensing lunatic asylums and, through the responsibilities of the lords lieutenant, command in the militia, the range of county responsibilities was enormous, and comprehended the elements that make up what later came to be called ‘social policy’. The particular achievement of the eighteenth century was to weld this into a system. The quarter sessions as they came to function were the magistrates’ system. Three key developments, which took place in different localities at different points in the century, helped to drive and consolidate this system. The first was the emergence of a regular chairman of the quarter sessions, who became the leading magis-

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trate and often took the lead in developing or coordinating policy. Kent had a regular chairman of the quarter sessions from the late eighteenth century, Gloucestershire not until a century later. Oxfordshire appointed a permanent chairman from the 1770s, and in the person of Sir Christopher Willoughby had, from 1778, a leading penal reformer and perhaps the most important innovator in poor law policy in the late eighteenth century. These chairmen were aided by increasingly professional clerks of the peace, and by an inner cabinet of active magistrates who met sometimes fortnightly and often monthly in adjured meetings of the quarter sessions. By the late eighteenth century this system of quarter sessions and magistrates’ power would drive through an experiment in social policy of unprecedented ambition. The world of eighteenth-century towns was very different. If we define towns as settlements of over 2,500 then in 1700 around 19 per cent of the population lived in towns; by 1800 this had risen to a little over 30 per cent. Behind these figures lay an important story. In 1700 Britain was a comparatively urbanized country, by 1800 perhaps another 1.7 million people were living in towns. Moreover, and more importantly, many of these were new towns or newly expanding towns. The great towns and cities of Britain, places such as Bristol and Liverpool, were being joined by new towns built on new wealth. Yet places such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Bradford were, for administrative purposes, mere villages. The incorporated towns remained those that had been historically incorporated. Corporations, too, varied hugely in their role, status and activity. Some corporations, such as those of Banbury and Buckingham, did little more than make the borough’s parliamentary returns. Other corporations in places as varied as Bath, Bristol, Congleton, Leicester, Nottingham and Oxford were active and dynamic. Nevertheless the politics of the corporation could be an intensely introspective politics. Rebuilt town halls provided new facilities; they also proclaimed the dignity of the commission. Towns too were places that created new patterns of local government to accommodate growing religious and cultural plurality. In places such as Bury St Edmunds the politics of the corporation was Anglican whereas the local vestries and improvement commissions were dominated by Dissenters, and in more diverse centres such as Bristol a still greater diversity developed within the city’s political culture. The world of the corporation was too circumscribed, and the number of corporations too historically limited for corporations to be able to comprehend the diversity and vibrancy of eighteenth-century urban life. The eighteenth century witnessed something like an urban renaissance. Theatres, public rooms, reading rooms, societies, inns and coffee houses flourished. Leisure, public spaces and social life were commercialized. Building and rebuilding became an insistent rhythm of urban life. The culture of improvement was visible in, and sustained through, urban life. The improving culture was facilitated by perhaps the most striking feature of eighteenth-century urban administration – the rise of the improvement commission. Local acts of parliament established commissions to promote paving, lighting, cleansing, water supply, highways, watching and policing. These commissions gave a new dimension to urban life. They had tax-levying and charging powers; they were armed by significant statutory powers; and they embraced Dissenters as well as Anglicans. In eighteenth-century Bath perhaps £3 million was spent on civic improvement and local development. More than any other development, the establishment of improvement commissions extended and diversified the

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governing elite of eighteenth-century Britain. Between 1760 and 1799 some 427 new improvement commissions were established. Again nineteenth-century reformers would caricature and condemn these commissions, and certainly the problems of early nineteenth-century urbanization outran their fiscal and political capacity. But in their eighteenth-century context, animated by a civically focused culture of improvement, they were often remarkably well adapted, and were the means through which the eighteenth century achieved municipal reform without a Municipal Corporations Act.

The Eighteenth-Century Achievement Perhaps the least well understood achievement of eighteenth-century local government lies in the remarkable experiments in social policy that occurred in the later part of the century. Although these experiments were as widely ramified as they were ambitious, they consisted predominantly in a transformation of penal policy and the elaboration of the poor law into integrated welfare provision. As we will see, the nineteenth century appropriated the former and rejected the latter, but both reveal a great deal about the capacity and ideology of Hanoverian local government. The European enlightenment was profoundly committed to rethinking the notion of punishment and deterrence. The most pervasive outcome of new penal thinking was the penitentiary or prison. Prisons were not new, and had long been places of confinement for those awaiting trial and redemption from debt. They were not, however, places of punishment, still less sites for the reformation of the criminal. Enlightenment thinking opened the way to remaking the prison. Punishment of the body, long characteristic of the western tradition, was increasingly rejected as brutalizing and irrational. Equally irrational was the prospect of brutal punishment as a deterrent to crime. Enlightenment thinking, with its emphasis on associationalist psychology, held out a new prospect of reforming the criminal. If men and women were made bad (or socially inadequate) by circumstances and association, they could be reformed and redeemed by placing them in a controlled environment which substituted rational and benign influences for the vicious and degrading circumstances which had degraded criminals. The prison would both rationally punish and literally remake the criminal. Interestingly it was in local government more than in parliament that the new enlightenment penology found its resonance. John Howard, pricked as high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1771, took his responsibilities of visiting and inspecting Bedfordshire prisons assiduously, and was scandalized by the conditions he found. He later embarked on a national programme of visits, a one-man inquiry, which was published in 1777 as The State of Prisons in England and Wales. The response would be rebuilding prisons and reforming prison regimes. Again local acts were used, although parliament passed enabling acts in 1779 and 1785. The leading figures in this penal transformation worked from and through local bases. Sir George Onesephorus Paul was high sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1780 and began a process that would make Gloucestershire a model county with new prisons and an integrated penal policy. Paul, a major Gloucestershire landowner, was also an active supporter of Christopher Wyvill’s reforming Association Movement, which numbered parliamentary reform among its objectives. Sir Christopher Willoughby, chairman of the Oxfordshire quarter sessions, advised government on prisons policy as well as rebuild-

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ing the Oxfordshire county gaol and equipping it with a new regulatory regime in which criminals deemed incapable of reformation were transported and those who responded to the stick of punishment and the carrots of education and religion would remain in the new model prison. In Salford the rebuilt prison was known locally as the New Bayley, after its projector, the chairman of the quarter sessions, Thomas Butterworth Bayley. All these men were networked. Paul’s library shows him to be well read in enlightenment penal theory, and within the thirty-five years between 1780 and 1815 most English county gaols were either rebuilt or substantially remodelled. The effects of these developments were profound. New model county prisons led to the closure of many local prisons. The management of prisons became more considered. The balance between labour, hard labour, education and religion was more carefully calibrated. Prisoners were increasingly carefully segregated, and with greater segregation and more stringent classification came higher building and rebuilding costs. Regular monitoring and magistrates’ committees to inspect county gaols became the norm, and prisons and penal policy loomed ever larger in county business. More profoundly still, the economy of deterrence was being remodelled by this penal revolution. The ‘bloody code’, which saw the number of capital statutes rise to over 200 by the end of the eighteenth century, was a curious exercise in liberty through terror. The fear of the gallows was expected both to deter and to obviate the need for a vigorous and intrusive police force. Detection might be unlikely but the penalties so astringent that the would-be criminal focused more on the dread of the gallows than on the unlikelihood of apprehension. The logic of punishment in prison, and reform of the criminal through prison, was that this balance between fearsome punishment and haphazard detection should be adjusted. With punishment in prison would come better police. The nineteenth century would draw the conclusions but the foundations had been laid in the eighteenth century. Committals to trial increased by 575 per cent between 1805 and 1840. By 1823 parliament was beginning to regulate prisons, by 1835 it instituted a prison inspectorate, and in 1877 it nationalized all prisons. Within a century the penal experiment of eighteenthcentury county government had been appropriated by the Home Office. The fate of the experiment in poverty and welfare was rather different. As in most periods, attitudes towards the poor in the eighteenth century oscillated between compassion and condemnation. The history of workhouse experiments captures something of this, with more stringent attitudes underlying the Workhouse Act of 1723, yet workhouses also formed a centrepiece of Thomas Gilbert’s more humanitarian 1782 act. Interestingly, for much of the mid-century, workhouses where they existed were used by the poor as a resource, without carrying a searing social stigma. Townspeople, for example, entered the Oxford workhouse in much the same way as they might avail themselves of local charities, charitable schools and almshouses. Poverty, or at any rate acute poverty, was cyclical, more often than not occasioned by lifecycles, illness or personal tragedy. In its acute form, for many in the mid-century poverty might be a passing phase rather than a perpetual circumstance. Charitable institutions, like the poor law, were well adapted to ameliorating poverty. The poor law, too, in urban and rural areas, could provide regular support to widows, singleparent families and the aged and chronically sick, without placing a crippling burden on ratepayers. Overseers determined entitlements, vestries gathered rates and modest

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transfer payments were made to the poor. It would be wrong to idealize this system, and public charity always had its critics, but it did give England and much of Wales a public strategy for assuaging poverty which was largely absent from Europe until Joseph II’s reforms in Austria in the 1780s and the revolutionary reconstruction of France in the 1790s. Scotland, with a different legacy from its reformation, continued with the kirk rather than the state as the organizing forum for public charity. Long-run demographic trends pushing up rural populations, changing patterns of employment in agriculture, enclosure and the decline of customary rights and entitlement, and the dislocations wrought by the American and French revolutionary wars created something like a new poverty by the close of the eighteenth century. Underlying this was what became structural underemployment and a low-wage economy in agriculture, with knock-on consequences for the rest of the rural economy. The dimensions of this poverty were mapped in works such as David Davies’s The Case of the Labourers in Husbandry (1795) and Frederick Eden’s The State of the Poor (1797). At the same time the Board of Agriculture, established in 1793, began a series of surveys of all counties and gathered detailed data of wages and prices in 1794. By 1795, with the war still further inflating bread prices, much of rural England was threatened with famine. Like many famines the core of the problem appeared to be a relative income collapse on the part of the poor. The response to this is well known: the development of the ‘Speenhamland system’, so called after the Pelican Inn at Speen where Berkshire magistrates met in May 1795 to ratify the payment of poor relief in aid of wages. Revealingly, nineteenth-century poor law reformers came to call this the ‘magistrates’ system’, which was accurate enough, but its real origins are deeply revealing of the sophistication which the magistrates’ system of local government had now developed. The real architect of the Speenhamland system was Sir Christopher Willoughby, and the key decision was taken at the Oxfordshire quarter sessions early in January 1795. Willoughby also persuaded Buckinghamshire magistrates to take an identical decision later in January. Willoughby, well networked within local government and an adviser on penal policy, was also a member of the Board of Agriculture established by parliament in 1793. He had been involved in surveying wages and prices in 1794. In short, he had a statistical basis and an analytical context against which to understand the likely impact of massive food price rises in late 1794 and early 1795. The key was not just the depth of poverty, it was also the inadequacy of incomes of those in work. What Oxfordshire magistrates agreed in January 1795 were minimum family incomes, adjusted for the number of children. Magistrates would use their powers to ensure that parishes provided these minimum incomes and all parishes would be circulated with the magistrates’ table of allowances, which were also published. The poor now knew to what they were minimally entitled. What Berkshire magistrates did was refine the system by introducing a formal sliding scale based on the price of a standard loaf of bread. However these reforms are characterized, they have the fundamental characteristics of a welfare state: minimum family incomes determined by the state, low wages supplemented from tax income, and modest transfer payments made to the very poor. Improvised in time of war, it was a remarkable achievement. Like all welfare systems, this invention of the magistrates soon attracted its critics. Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) castigated it as counterproductive, as a humanitarian delusion which actually intensified the poverty

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it sought to relieve. A generation later, in 1834, the system was torn down amidst an indictment of the unelected magistrates who had constructed it. The system created in 1795 became institutionalized in ways which its projectors had perhaps not envisaged. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars it had become massively expensive, with poor relief expenditure exceeding £8 million in 1818. In trying to meet the challenges of an essentially rural poverty, magistrates overextended the Hanoverian system of local government. Without being representative of or accountable to the ratepayers, they made demands which ratepayers came to regard as excessive. They made the poor into a transparent public charge. For this, and more, magistrates came to be reviled. In fact, the language in which they cast their decision, which was measured and paternalistic, reflected the values which had come to animate county government in the later eighteenth century. It was the language of ambition rather than complacency. In penal policy and poor law reform county government found a reforming energy that matched the improving enthusiasms of urban Britain. Of course the overall record of eighteenth-century local government is patchy, and like all systems of administration which rely heavily on individuals, it reflected the particularity and partiality of individual visions. To more systematic and bureaucratic cultures it looked hopelessly, indeed wilfully, unsystematic. Critics were wrong to suggest that it was wholly unrepresentative – vestries and some urban bodies were formally and often actually representative – but patronage, particularly within the magistracy, was at least equally characteristic. What eighteenth-century local government does demonstrate, however, is that local self-government retained its resonance for the governing elites of the provinces. Moreover, and most important, public life in eighteenth-century Britain was far more broadly based and far more pluralistic than the century’s Whig and radical critics ever suggested.

FURTHER READING Beattie, J. M.: Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986). Borsay, Peter: The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989). Corfield, Penelope J.: The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982). Eastwood, David: Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700–1870 (Basingstoke, 1997). Hay, Douglas, Linebaugh, Peter and Thompson, E. P.: Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975). Hey, David (ed.): The History of Myddle: Richard Gough (Harmondsworth, 1981). Ignatieff, Michael: A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (London, 1978). Innes, Joanna: ‘Parliament and the shaping of eighteenth-century social policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 40 (1990), pp. 63–92. Jenkins, Philip: The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983). Langford, Paul: Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). Neuman, Mark: The Speenhamland County: Poverty and the Poor Laws in Berkshire 1782–1834 (London, 1982).

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Rogers, Nicholas: Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989). Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice: History of English Local Government (9 vols, London, 1906–29). Whetstone, Ann E.: Scottish County Government in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1981).

Chapter Five

Parliament, Parties and Elections (1688–1760) Brian Hill

During the century and a half before 1688 parliament grew in importance: most similar institutions in Europe disappeared under the impact of absolutist monarchy. Co-opted by Henry VIII to legitimize his seizure of supreme authority in the English church, parliament acquired a major stake in the political establishment. Succeeding reigns saw parliamentarians challenge the crown’s authority in national finance, the law and even government. In the civil wars of the 1640s, however, the Long Parliament’s resort to force proved dangerous, for the army turned against the parliament itself. After 1660 a restored monarchy recovered some of its powers by prolonging the life of the compliant Cavalier Parliament for nearly two decades. When this body became too turbulent Charles II and James II used their prerogative power to dissolve both it and the four succeeding short-lived parliaments, and also claimed the right to suspend or dispense with existing legislation. A growing cult of divine right monarchy, demanding passive obedience and non-resistance from subjects, appeared to threaten earlier parliamentary gains, and the political nation removed James in the Revolution of 1688 with minimum use of force.

The Post-Revolution Political System In the aftermath of the Revolution most peers and members of parliament (MPs) were agreed that a further enhancement of their power was needed, and they passed the Bill of Rights to limit the powers of monarchy, the Triennial Act to regulate the life of parliament, and the Treason Act to prevent monarchs from using treason law against political opponents. Above all, MPs ensured that parliament would have regular and prolonged meetings, providing a permanent forum to counter monarchy’s continuous presence. This objective was achieved by a variety of means, especially the voting of financial supplies to government for only one year at a time. The sanction process was aided by the need of post-Revolution monarchs to raise money for expensive wars against France. Determined and sustained use of the power of the purse, to prevent rulers from ever again intimidating or dispensing with parliament,

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transformed the political scene, assisting a long-term process of reducing the power of the crown. Of all changes after 1688 none was more visible than parliament’s continual presence, compared with the long periods of non-parliamentary rule experienced under the Stuarts and earlier, such as the ‘eleven-year tyranny’ of the 1630s and two intervals of nearly three years each in the 1680s. Moreover, from 1689 onwards the business of both houses took up many months of every year, in contrast to the often truncated parliamentary proceedings of a few weeks, or even a few days, before 1688. Beyond permanence and frequency of meeting, MPs were not prepared to go. The electoral system remained largely unchanged and there was no general desire to revive experiments of the Interregnum in the 1650s such as a wider franchise, equal distribution of borough seats by number of voters, or the abolition of the House of Lords. Such measures would have smacked of republicanism, social equality and equal distribution of property, ideas which post-Revolution society was not prepared to air openly, though these ideas lingered on among common men and intellectuals until the time was ripe for a new outburst from the later 1760s, in the era of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. The new prestige which parliament enjoyed even outside Britain in the eighteenth century, as a result of successfully establishing its regular presence on the political scene, had some important results for the nature of government. Under the Stuart monarchs financial supplies offered by the Commons had rarely erred on the side of generosity. The various expedients by which these monarchs had tried to supplement their income, such as secret subsidies from a foreign power, prerogative taxes of dubious legitimacy, and the sale of irreplaceable assets, had resulted in a marked and national lack of confidence in Stuart kingship. But four or five years of parliamentary financial control after the Revolution of 1688–9 brought remarkable changes. With parliament willing and able to allot taxation for funding interest payments on government loans, the resources of an increasingly prosperous financial community were opened dramatically, allowing William III to fight a major war on a scale never available to his predecessors. Britain’s military successes under Marlborough in the next reign were the direct result of a new confidence in government, signalled by such major steps as the Million Loan of 1693, the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 to channel City wealth into the Treasury, and the gradual emergence of a funded national debt. By the late seventeenth century the parliament of England and Wales had a lower house of 513 members, a number enhanced by forty-five new members in the union with Scotland’s parliament in 1707, bringing the total for the Commons of Great Britain to 558. Nearly all English constituencies returned two members, a practice not phased out until the nineteenth century. Two-member constituencies allowed some flexibility, since electors could use their second votes to allow minority parties or groups to acquire the second seat. Rival parties sometimes agreed informally to put forward only one candidate each, avoiding the expense of a contested election. The national electorate was large enough to express public opinion fairly accurately, especially in the larger-franchise constituencies, even though representation deteriorated somewhat as population increased, while a new ‘last determinations’ law in 1729 hampered the increase of voters by custom. There was no secret ballot and electors identified in poll books were open to various pressures, especially in the smaller boroughs.

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Contemporaries recognized two types of constituency: counties and boroughs. The forty counties of England, which returned eighty members, had a uniform franchise, the forty-shilling freehold, and each enjoyed electorates of several thousands. Large urban boroughs too could have thousands of voters. But the great majority of borough seats had electorates of only a few hundred, in some cases even fewer. It was the small electorates in particular which stood open to patron pressure, bribery and corruption, and made up the legendary ‘pocket’ boroughs. The widely varying franchises prevailing in the boroughs, based on ownership of property, payment of local rates, freedoms, or membership of corporations, aided dubious electoral practices. English counties and the large-franchise boroughs, having too many voters to be in any patron’s pocket, enjoyed much prestige as true indicators of public opinion, and their representatives in parliament were regarded as the elite of MPs. General interest in politics was not confined to voters. Wider participation in political discussion was ensured by the newspaper press, which grew rapidly after parliament’s inadvertent abandonment of censorship in 1695. By 1760 there were four dailies, five or six thrice-weeklies and four weeklies serving London and the southeast, and dozens of other weeklies elsewhere. Knowledge of current political issues spread far more widely than in pre-Revolution days, adding to electoral pressure on MPs from informed public opinion. The right of petition to parliament was widely used, sometimes concerted between areas, and was not confined to voters. Under the Triennial Act of 1694 parliament had to be re-elected at least once every three years. The intention of its devisers was not only to ensure the continuity of parliament but also to lessen the opportunity for ministers in the Commons to build up a subservient ‘Court party’ of officeholders without the electorate having an early opportunity to reject them. In practice general elections came so often, on average every two years between 1695 and 1715, that the constituencies remained in constant turmoil, and ministerial management of the Commons often became impossible. The Septennial Act of 1716 increased the permitted time between elections to a maximum of seven years, and parliament often subsequently went the full period. If the earlier measure helped to ensure the legislature’s permanence, the later one retained this but calmed political life and allowed a new growth of patronage in both Westminster and its constituencies. Membership of the House of Commons consisted overwhelmingly of landed gentry, though there were increasing numbers of lawyers, financiers and businessmen. The latter elements used their wealth to buy into substantial landownership, as required by an act of parliament of 1711. There were no working-class MPs, though patrons could sometimes evade this landed qualification act and could bring into the Commons able men who did not themselves possess the necessary landed property. Many candidates for election paid large sums for their seats, though the outcome of such expenses was far from guaranteed in any but the most docile of constituencies. MPs were unpaid as such and many had an adequate private income to sustain the expenses of being an MP, but some sought remuneration from government offices, many of which are now held by permanent civil servants. Major ‘placemen’, who held government office, were usually expected to vote for the government of the day. Other perquisites such as honours, local offices, tax collectorships and magistracies were welcome to all MPs, for either themselves or their supporters; but such lesser benefits did not carry so much obligation to the government, if any.

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The House of Lords was of similar social composition to the lower chamber, but peers were on the whole richer. The hereditary principle dominated, with a minority of bishops and senior law officers as non-hereditary members. The absence of any responsibility to an electorate made the Lords particularly prone to pressure from crown or ministers, and the upper house was usually compliant to government’s wishes. Peers could sometimes apply restraint to the Commons but usually tried to avoid confrontation with the elected chamber, especially over money matters, for by 1689 the convention that the Lords could not reject money bills was already observed. Where taxation was concerned, the peers preferred not to offend public opinion, which they accepted was better represented by the Commons. The complex systems of elections which had grown up over centuries differed in detail almost from borough to borough, giving rise to many anomalies. With local practices prevailing it was often difficult for returning officers to know exactly who was entitled to vote. Such dilemmas gave rise, at the opening of parliament after every general election, to the hearing of disputes between those who had been returned as certified winners and those who claimed to have been defeated by illicit means. The decisions taken on disputed elections actually swung the balance against Robert Walpole’s long ministry in December–January, 1741–2, or could enhance an existing majority, as when, after the 1715 election, a Whig majority voted to replace thirtyone duly returned Tories by Whig claimants but to reject the claims of all forty-six Tory petitioners. Not until Grenville’s Act of 1771 was a fairer system of determining election disputes devised, and a uniform borough franchise was not introduced until the first Reform Bill in 1832. Without the increased importance of parliament after the Revolution the development of a new type of political party could not have taken place. In the Cavalier Parliament, Court and Country parties had existed, but these differed in important respects from later parties, for they possessed little idea of competing to exchange the roles of office and opposition. The Court party, looking to the monarch as its leader and wishing to serve the government, could not by its nature go into opposition. The Country party, a diverse set of MPs who voted on issues as they saw fit and who were generally critical of the expenses and practices of government, could not enter government as a party. Soon after the Revolution, however, the new Tory and Whig parties underwent several major interchanges between government and opposition, and parliament witnessed regular conflicts between these two parties. With the Whig ascendancy from 1714 to 1760 ministerial changes became less frequent and were confined to Whigs. The Whig and Tory parties differed from their modern successors in some important respects: they had no national organization linking constituencies with the parliamentary party, and any constituency organizations bore only embryonic resemblance to those of today. In parliament mechanisms to make supporters available for important divisions were effective but primitive by modern standards, especially in lacking the sanction of reporting dereliction of duty to any local party organization. A party in office could use the junior Treasury ministers to exert some discipline on its supporters in the Commons, while opposition leaders could ensure attendance at divisions only through voluntary party managers. The names Tory and Whig originally arose as terms of abuse: meaning, respectively, Catholic Irish outcasts and Presbyterian Scottish outcasts from pre-Revolution

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Anglican society. The two terms were first used at Westminster during the Exclusion crisis of 1679–82, when the taunt of Tory was applied to the crown’s supporters and that of Whig to its opponents. Three successive parliaments were dissolved by Charles II when the Commons brought in bills to exclude his brother James, a Catholic, from the succession. After Tories joined Whigs reluctantly and briefly in order to protect the Church of England and remove the Catholic James II in 1688, their differences were renewed by fresh issues which divided the nation between 1689 and about 1720. Thereafter, the residue of such issues kept party differences alive in a situation of continuous Whig dominance until 1760, when new circumstances dictated a collapse of both parties and a slow emergence of successors which was not completed until early in the nineteenth century.

Whig–Tory Rivalry, 1688–1714 As soon as the immediate Catholic threat was removed in 1688 there came to the fore the deeply contentious rivalry of Anglican Episcopalians and Protestant Dissenters, hardened by two generations of persecution and counter-persecution (though this had been temporarily suppressed in the common cause against James II). The Toleration Act of 1689, by which Anglicans recognized the Dissenters’ right to worship in their own way, did not extend to the removal of the civil disabilities under which the Dissenters had been placed by the Test and Corporation Acts of the Cavalier Parliament, including exclusion from all government and local offices. The practice of some Dissenters of occasionally taking Anglican communion in order to obtain office under the crown or to join a borough corporation angered Anglicans, just as Anglican insistence on making a test of the sacrament infuriated Dissenters. To religious differences were added grievances concerning the Dissenters’ control of dozens of boroughs where the corporation or freemen constituted the electorate. Purges of corporations to control national elections took place under Charles II and James II. The burning resentments of the local oligarchies thus dispossessed came before parliament as early as 1689, and control of the borough seats continued to be sharply contested between Dissenters, who voted for Whig candidates, and their opponents who favoured Tories. Bishop Burnet noted in 1708 that the party differences existed not only in parliamentary elections but even in the yearly elections of mayors and corporations, and that in every corner of the nation the two parties stood, as it were, listed against one another. In parliament wartime expenditure on an unprecedented scale after 1689 proved increasingly politically divisive, with Tories favouring relatively cheap naval and only limited land operations, while the Whigs favoured more expensive military intervention in Europe against France’s armies. To pay for extended and expensive war the Whigs were prepared to support the financial revolution which saw the creation of the Bank of England, the national debt and a new system of public credit. The Whigs supported the financial interests of the City of London, who stood to gain from lending to the government at high wartime rates of interest, while the Tories sympathized more with the country landowners, who paid the land tax that helped to meet the interest rates on the large war loans raised by the government and sanctioned by parliament.

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The two related questions of defence of the established Church of England and the safeguarding of the Protestant succession were never far from the fore. The Tories’ main commitment remained always the safety of the Church of England, whether against Roman Catholics or Protestant Dissenters, a defining principle of their party because the Whigs, though mainly Anglican (as MPs were required to be), were more tolerant of Protestant Dissenters and favoured them as reliable election supporters. But the Whigs’ main aim from the Exclusion crisis onwards was rejection of the Catholic Stuarts. Although the majority of Tories demonstrated in 1688, 1715 and 1745 that they too were basically loyal to the Protestant succession, enough ‘Jacobite’ supporters of the exiled House of Stuart remained within their ranks to cast doubt on the whole party’s commitment to the Hanoverian succession. This helped to ensure that only the Whig party could claim undivided loyalty to the Protestant cause. In the early 1690s the committed Tories and Whigs in the Commons were still a minority of its members. At first most MPs stood aloof from the party men, regarding them as extremists. This opinion had much truth. Both groups had to undergo decisively changed patterns of thought to adapt themselves to the post-Revolution world. The Whigs at first still possessed the mentality of opposition. In the Exclusion era they had shown a marked antipathy to monarchy, often favouring a republican model of government. King William, however, was needed to preserve the Protestant religion, and the Whigs had to work with him in parliament by dropping their former fanaticism. This they duly did, aided by the rise of more circumspect leaders known as the ‘Junto’ (John Somers, Charles Montagu, Thomas Wharton and Edward Russell). These four assumed control of William’s ministry in 1694–5, when Montagu established government credit by founding the Bank of England. With their accession to power the Whigs’ older republicanism and radicalism declined, to be replaced by a pursuit of power and support for the new postRevolution monarchy. The Tories immediately after the Revolution also presented a spectacle of ideological disarray, and were forced to adjust their traditional ideas. Formerly the party of the Court, they had joined in the removal of James II rather than allow him to threaten the position of the Church of England, of which he was legally the head. But though they had resisted James despite their preference for the theories of passive obedience and non-resistance, they still initially hesitated to form a concerted political opposition to William and Mary, even though these monarchs had plainly been called into their position by parliament rather than by divine right. The Tories’ reluctance began to change, however, when Mary, on whose share of the throne they had insisted, died in 1694. The Tories moved cautiously into opposition, led by the earls of Nottingham and Rochester, assisted by a small band of ‘Old Whigs’ discontented with the political ambitions of the Junto. Tory opposition became overt when a temporary peace with France in 1697 encouraged calls for government economy and the disbandment of much of William’s army. For three years Tories and Old Whigs called themselves the New Country party, combining the image of respectable Country patriotism with the reality of the Tories’ first furious party opposition. By 1700 a tense situation in which the ministry could not carry even routine business in the Commons came to an end with the replace-

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ment of the Junto by Rochester and the Tories. By this time these had so far abandoned their traditional stance of subservience to monarchy that, Rochester bluntly told the king, princes must not only hear good advice, but must take it. Although infuriated, William had to stand by while the Tories placed further extensive limitations on the powers of monarchy in the Act of Settlement of 1701 that decided the line of succession (after William’s death and that of his half-sister, Anne). The succession of the deeply Anglican Anne to the throne in 1702 benefited the Tories. By Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14) MPs are seen, from surviving division lists, to be voting solidly with one party or the other, with only about one eighth of them ever cross-voting; smaller groupings within or outside the major parties were no more significant than in most modern periods of predominantly two-party strife. Even the House of Lords displayed greater than usual party affinities. From the outset of Anne’s reign Tory ministers carried out a sweeping purge of opponents from office at all levels, following Somers’s example under William and Mary. Mounting Tory xenophobia was directed against the Dutch and other foreign Calvinists who played a vital role in the City of London. The Tories also found it increasingly difficult to support the raising of the huge loans and the voting of the high taxes needed to support the efforts of Lord Treasurer Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough to defeat France in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). Outside parliament what has been called a ‘Divided Society’ echoed and reinforced the marked political differences between the two major parties at Westminster. Early in Anne’s reign the most serious party difference concerned the Dissenters’ control of scores of borough seats by obtaining places through occasional conformity to the tests imposed in the Cavalier Parliament’s Corporation Act. The Tories’ indignation at this practice and their hunger for more parliamentary seats, together with their fear of a Puritan political revival, produced three attempts in Anne’s first three years to introduce severe financial penalties for occasional conformists, threatening to alarm the City of London and end loans from its mainly Dissenting community. Finally, the high churchmen’s ‘tack’ of an occasional conformity penal bill onto a tax bill in the Commons (to avoid rejection in the Lords) was averted only by a combination of Lord Treasurer Godolphin’s placemen, moderate Tories and the Whig party, but at the cost of making political concessions to the Junto. These, serving in a special commission, were allowed to steer through a parliamentary union between England and Scotland. The union strengthened the provisions for the Protestant House of Hanover to succeed Anne in both kingdoms; but the further advantage for the Junto lay in the forty-five new MPs from Scotland, the native land of Whiggery, who entered the newly united House of Commons in 1707 and helped to swing the balance in favour of the Whigs. The Junto were able to force the queen to give them office – against her inclination – a year later. The last six years of Queen Anne’s reign saw an appearance of partisan fanaticism greater than anything seen since the Exclusion crisis. War weariness, especially among land taxpayers, was widespread. The Whigs, however, with the approval of the elector of Hanover, set out to prolong the war with France for the advantage of the elector’s Austrian suzerain, the Holy Roman Emperor, and also so that France, the principal sponsor nation of King James’s son ‘James III’, would remain Britain’s enemy if Anne died soon. The methods used by the Whig ministers went far beyond national

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interest: the Dutch allies were bribed to put aside reasonable French peace proposals, and negotiations with France were sabotaged by excessive British demands. The Junto’s worst action, in the eyes of most English opinion, was to impeach the high church clergyman, Henry Sacheverell, for preaching a sermon ‘In Peril among False Brethren’, indicting Godolphin’s ministry and appearing to favour the succession of the House of Stuart. Sacheverell was the most vociferous spokesman for the surviving Jacobite sentiment and political theory held especially strongly in the lower clergy’s house in the Convocation of Canterbury, the church’s premier institution. But the use of impeachment, parliament’s principal instrument of political retribution, against a clergyman aroused clamorous resentment not only from high Tories but also from moderate public opinion, rallying to the clarion call of ‘the Church in Danger’. The queen replaced Godolphin and the Junto in 1710 by Rochester and her confidant Robert Harley, who called an election which gave a landslide victory to the Tories, despite Harley’s own efforts from the Treasury to restrain the high churchmen. Moderation was swept aside in a Tory frenzy of desire for peace and fear for the safety of the Church of England. The great achievement of the Tory ministry of 1710–14 was the eventual bringing of the War of the Spanish Succession to a successful end by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. At home, however, the ministry was wracked with serious political problems. Whig extremism provoked equal extremism, with the high Tories being led from within the new ministry by Henry St John (later Viscount Bolingbroke). An act of parliament was at last passed in 1711, setting heavy penalties for occasional conformity, and an even more draconian measure, the Schism Act, was intended in 1714 to destroy Protestant Dissent itself by strangling its educational system. The Tories were largely united in support of these measures, but they were badly divided on how to cope with the succession to the childless Queen Anne. Any expectation on the part of concealed Jacobites to restore the Stuarts peacefully was destroyed in 1713–14 when a substantial minority of ‘Hanoverian’ Tories voted on key occasions alongside the Whigs for fear that the Protestant succession was in danger. It was clear that the Stuart claimant to the throne could only be imposed by force and that an armed invasion by the Stuart Pretender, James Edward, would not find strong enough Tory support in parliament. The feared possibility of civil war on Anne’s death was avoided because parliamentary strife proved sufficient, rather than armed conflict, and the moderate Tories moved once more to the political centre in a brief alliance with Whigs against the high Tories in order to secure the Protestant succession of the Hanoverian George I in 1714. ‘The Rage of Party’, as the historian J. H. Plumb called these events, was never to be as great again in the eighteenth century. But Plumb’s belief that a growth of political and social stability in the era of Robert Walpole rectified the instability of the period before 1714 needs some modification, for the principal growth of stability began with the Revolution Settlement itself. The highly contentious period from 1689 to 1714 provides the first example of representative political institutions taking the strain of volatile events without breaking. Early in 1714 both sides were reported to have been drilling for a resort to arms. That Queen Anne’s death was followed by the peaceful accession of George of Hanover is a testimony to the basic soundness of institutions devised during the first quarter of a century after the Glorious Revolution.

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The Whig Supremacy The Hanoverian era presents a spectacle of parliamentary tranquillity compared to that of William III and Anne. A ratio of voters to population estimated for 1722 at one to four adult males deteriorated somewhat as population increased; and the period saw the institutionalization, with some modification, of many changes made since the Revolution. Parliament continued to sit regularly for many months of each year, though general elections became less frequent after 1716. The concept of a permanent national funded debt became better accepted despite the ill-advised South Sea scheme of the early 1720s that attempted to reduce it precipitately. The nature of parties underwent some further modification as a result of decades of Whig dominance, but as government was always run exclusively by Whigs, while the Tory party remained permanently the focus of opposition, the new situation did not amount to a revival of the pre-Revolution Court and Country pattern. Some Whigs now joined in opposition from time to time, the better to force their way into office, but the Tories were stubborn in their refusal to enter any ministry except as a party, and they have been shown to have a remarkably consistent pattern of opposition voting and of political independence from dissident Whigs. The decline of the Tory party after 1714 was due to systematic suppression by a combination of royal preference, Whig patronage and the electorate’s revulsion against the excesses of Anne’s last ministry. The first step was the displacement of virtually all Tories from office or place, perquisite or favour. The purge was even more thorough than the Tory one in 1702. An election in 1715 returned 341 Whigs to 217 Tories, almost reversing the result of 1710 and reflecting a major swing of floating voters, who moved from fear on behalf of the Church of England in 1710 to alarm at the Stuart threat to the Protestant succession by 1715. In 1717 Convocation was suspended, effectively removing the high churchmen’s main propaganda platform. Finally, the ministry extended its control of parliament by the Septennial Act, reducing the frequency of general elections and giving longer tenure to the existing Whig majority. Whig dominance of government and parliament helped to consolidate the party’s control of the smaller borough constituencies for some decades. That the Tory party survived in parliament as an effective, if reduced, party was due to factors beyond the powers of Whig managers to control, particularly the large electorates in some boroughs and in the English counties. In 1715 these counties returned forty-nine Tories to thirty-one Whigs, strongly against the trend in the smaller boroughs of under 1,000 voters that elected 234 Whigs to 124 Tories. The overall Whig victory reflected an imbalance in the size of constituency electorates, for the overall number of votes for each of the parties across the nation was about equal. Substantial Tory majorities in the large-franchise constituencies were cast for a few score candidates, while relatively small electorates in the numerous small boroughs returned hundreds of Whigs. The smaller boroughs did not again return a majority of ‘Tories’ until the rise of a new party system at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. The rise of Robert Walpole followed the first split among the Whigs in 1717. Despite the obvious overtones of a struggle for control of patronage among a party now too large to satisfy all its claimants, the issues which divided the two main groups

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were substantial and important. Lord Stanhope at first prevailed, but his ministry’s use of British resources to further the interests of George I’s German possessions gave cause for objections by Lord Townshend and his brother-in-law, Robert Walpole. In domestic policies Stanhope represented an idealist element closer to the original Whigs of the Exclusion era, while Walpole appeared more pragmatic. All Whigs agreed to repeal the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, but Stanhope wished also to remove the Test and Corporation Acts of Charles II’s reign and allow Protestant Dissenters to take a wide range of offices. The Townshend–Walpole group’s preference was for retaining the tests, since Dissenters would vote for Whig candidates anyway, and there was every reason to mollify the Anglican church which included most English people and which the Whigs needed to win over from the Tory cause. A large body of Walpole Whigs helped the Tories to reject Stanhope’s scheme, together with his proposal to strengthen the House of Lords by means of the Peerage Bill, moving politics closer to the centre against the Whig party extremity. Walpole’s primacy (1721–42) rested on a control of parliament arising from a powerful combination of party principles and patronage. In the House of Lords ministerial pressure on the bishops, obtained by judicious career advancement from poor to rich bishoprics, accounted for up to twenty-six votes, twenty-five of which saved Walpole from a defeat on one major occasion in 1733. Government management, aided by Scotland’s staunch Whiggery, ensured that only one Tory was returned for the northern kingdom in the 1722 election, and none in 1727. Most Scottish MPs were co-opted into the ranks of the Court and Treasury party (those placemen who could usually be counted upon to vote on the government’s side). But a putative eighteenth-century maximum of 200 placemen by 1760 never dominated the Commons of 558 members, and the ministry relied for survival on the large number of Whigs who, regardless of patronage, supported Walpole’s formula of combining support for the House of Hanover with low taxation and restraint on the expensive overseas policies of the Hanoverian monarchs. In the light of such powerful ministerial control it is hardly surprising that the main tactic of opposition was to maintain that Walpole’s following was but a corrupt revival of the Court party of old, and that true patriotism lay with Country members, whether Tory or Whig. So far as some issues were concerned there was some truth in this. Peace with France had removed sharp issues of war strategy and expense. But other major party issues still remained: Walpole’s domination of the Episcopal hierarchy did little to detach the lower Anglican clergy and laity from the Tories, and there remained too the overarching question of whether a successful Jacobite restoration could yet be staged, an event which some Tories secretly wished for but almost no Whig could contemplate. The rival fears of the Church in Danger and the Hanoverian monarchy in jeopardy continued to keep the rank-and-file members of the two parties far apart. The taint of Jacobitism by association was a powerful bogey to prevent too many disaffected Whigs from joining for very long with any genuinely Tory opposition, while what has recently been called the ‘Jacobite fringe’ of the Tory party was in reality too ineffective to endanger the House of Hanover. Walpole’s tenure of the Treasury saw the beginning of the role of a ‘prime’ minister, one who could carry much of the authority formerly attached to the crown itself. He largely dispensed with the new, larger cabinet, which had been formalized

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in Anne’s reign, and relied instead on a small inner cabinet, stretching the powers of a minister up to, some said beyond, their possible limit. With the backing of most Whigs, the Townshend–Walpole group was able to manoeuvre George I’s preferred minister Lord Carteret, a convert from Toryism, out of harm’s way, while Walpole’s acceptability to the Commons ensured that when George II came to the throne in 1727 his favourite, Spencer Compton, fared likewise. Thereafter, complaints that Walpole was so ambitious that he was usurping the power of the king grew more clamorous. Since Walpole’s authority came from parliament (and not just from royal favour), he was also dependent on that parliamentary support. He always showed himself aware that if he lost his majority he would lose power, as he eventually did in 1742. The reign of George II saw the emergence of a social trend which was to continue down to 1760 and beyond. Acts of parliament for enclosure of land and for punishing crimes against property increased. No general protest from the lowest classes was easily possible, and rumblings of discontent were confined to riots or voting for government opponents, even for suspected Jacobites. The high point of ministerial conciliation of landed society was Walpole’s reduction of the land tax to one shilling in the pound (the wartime level being four shillings) and increases of other indirect taxes. A new salt duty which fell mainly on the poor met widespread resistance. But it was the proposal to subject wine and tobacco to excise duties which aroused the greatest public hysteria in 1733 and also strong parliamentary resistance in a year before a general election. The ministry was forced to withdraw the intended duties after its majority fell briefly to sixteen in the Commons. After this display that parliament could closely reflect national opinion, a residue of the agitation was seen in 1734 with a Tory electoral gain of seventeen seats. Even more ominous for Walpole was the appearance of a large number of Whigs committed to the opposition. Further Whig defections, together with an unsuccessful war on which Walpole reluctantly embarked in 1739 (after considerable public pressure), reduced his immediate majority to about twenty in the general election of 1741, and Walpole fell from office early in 1742 after losing a series of disputed elections, brought down by a transient combination of Tories and opposition Whigs. Henry Pelham’s ministry from the mid-1740s to the mid-1750s did more to cement post-Revolution developments than did Walpole’s. He made better use of the cabinet and set up a consolidated fund to combine miscellaneous items of the national debt at a lower rate of interest. Pelham and his elder brother the duke of Newcastle ensured that the Tories gained little. Pelham inherited the support of the ‘Old Corps of Whigs’ in parliament, both independent Whigs and Court and Treasury men, and Walpole’s longstanding reluctance to place Tories in office was shared by the new ministers, who settled mainly for shuttling various cliques of Whigs in and out of office. Pelham’s greater willingness to conciliate rival Whigs by a share of office pro tem strengthened him in a revival of ministerial clashes with the king, which were prompted by George II’s policies in the War of the Austrian Succession. Within four years of Walpole’s fall the Pelhams forced George II to abandon ministers he favoured, especially the reinstated Carteret, and they organized cabinet and other ministers, some forty-five in all, in a mass resignation to secure a set of concessions that included the appointment to office of William Pitt, whom the monarch detested.

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The Pelhams followed their coup by an early election in 1747, resulting in victory against ill-prepared Tories and Whig opposition groups and bettering Walpole’s election result of 1734. The revival of Whig disregard of royalty in issues of national importance upset more than the king. His eldest son, Prince Frederick, determined that when he came to the throne he would not be humiliated like his father. A way lay open for him to secure parliamentary support in the failure of all but a few English Tories to support the Young Pretender Charles Edward’s rebellion of 1745, suggesting that traditional Tory loyalty to monarchy might, except in the case of a dwindling body of Jacobites, be diverted to service of the House of Hanover. Within two years of this event Prince Frederick came to an understanding with the Tories that in return for their cooperation he would, when he came to the throne, abolish ‘all distinctions of party’, remove their exclusion from office and give them a share of local appointments and commissions in an effective militia. The Tories and Frederick’s Whig followers provided the only opposition to Pelham in the Commons until the prince’s early death in 1751. In these few years he had succeeded in beginning the new direction in politics which his elder son Prince George was to follow. The Walpole–Pelham system began to fall apart when Newcastle took control of the Treasury on his brother’s death in 1754. A general election in that year gave the Old Corps of Whigs their usual victory, with a low Tory party return of 106 MPs and only some forty-two Whigs currently in opposition. But Newcastle was soon forced to share power with William Pitt after serious setbacks in a major new war with France (which started in America in 1754 and spread to Europe in 1756). The Tories in parliament sealed a new alliance with the young Prince George and ceased opposition for the first time since 1714, following the lead of the prince’s court, though old party disputes continued in many areas and walks of life in the late 1750s.

Conclusion The period from 1688 to 1760 saw a new map of political life come into being. Parliament functioned continually, rivalling monarchy’s own permanence and making possible novel governmental structures. Deficit finance based on loans funded yearly by parliamentary taxes provided the means for post-Revolution governments to fight Britain’s expensive wars of the eighteenth century, which raised her to the rank of a first class power. The new Whig and Tory parties of the 1690s, relieved of immutable Court and Country roles, competed for office within a permanent parliamentary framework, and though party animosities sometimes ran to extremes they did not slide over into physical force, apart from the occasions when a parliamentary minority supported the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The Tories’ worst nightmare was a revival of militant Puritanism under a new Oliver Cromwell, but post-Revolution Dissenters were no Puritans and had little remaining political ambition except to share the political rights open to others. The Whigs’ fear of a new restoration of the Catholic Stuarts had more reality, but few Tories could countenance the return of the Stuart Pretender unless he abandoned Roman Catholicism, which he always refused to do. Party dialogue gradually marginalized extreme views and strengthened the centre, with moderates combining in the crises of 1688–9, 1704, 1714 and 1719.

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The electoral system in the constituencies did not change markedly in the early eighteenth century, though patron management became more systematic. Pressure for electoral reform had to await the 1760s and beyond. The later radical mythology of an all-powerful system of rotten boroughs needs, however, to be treated with caution, for even in closed constituencies public opinion, if aroused, could override the bastions of patronage. Strong public interest could greatly affect general elections, as in 1710, 1715 and 1734. The Triennial Act, in reaction against the Stuarts’ habit of either keeping a favourable parliament too long or doing without one altogether for long periods, kept politics overheated for two decades after 1694, whereas the Septennial Act of 1716 arguably placed too much power in the hands of government by lessening the frequency of elections. The pace of changes after 1688 was too rapid for all of these developments to be immediately absorbed into political life. But most changes were considered and temperate, more so than those of the Interregnum of the 1650s, and they certainly proved longlasting. The weaknesses and misunderstanding of the national debt came to light in the South Sea crisis of the early 1720s, and had to be rectified. Thereafter, Britain’s credit system was always a major advantage in her expensive wars against France. General elections became less frequent after 1715, but they remained regular and far from subject to a return of royal whims. Because of the ‘proscription’ of Tories under George I and George II the parties lost momentum, but both survived despite the forecasts of critics. George III planned the end of Whig dominance, and the original parties were dissolved in the 1760s amid rapidly changing ministries. From this process a reformed and leaner Whig party emerged in opposition by the 1780s, facing a new party of government under William Pitt the Younger, which became the basis, by the early nineteenth century, of a revived Tory party. None of the major political developments of the post-Revolution era – annual sessions of parliament, political parties, the national debt and deficit finance, the Protestant succession, the post of prime minister and the role of the cabinet – was lost, for they were inextricably tied together.

FURTHER READING Black, Jeremy: Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1990). Clark, J. C. D.: The Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and the English Party Systems (Cambridge, 1982). Colley, Linda: In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982). Dickinson, H. T.: Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973). Dickinson, H. T.: Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977). Dickinson, H. T.: The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 1995). Hill, B. W.: The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689–1742 (London, 1976). Hill, Brian W.: British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832 (London, 1985). Holmes, G. S. (ed.): Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (London, 1967). Holmes, Geoffrey: British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967). Kenyon, John P.: Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977). Monod, Paul K.: Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989).

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O’Gorman, Frank: Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989). Owen, John B.: The Rise of the Pelhams (London, 1957). Plumb, J. H.: The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967). Rogers, Nicholas: Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989). Sedgwick, Romney (ed.): The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754 (2 vols, London, 1970). Speck, W. A.: Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies 1701–1715 (London, 1970).

Chapter Six

Parliament, Parties and Elections (1760–1815) Stephen M. Lee

In the world of late eighteenth-century politics, parliament was not simply the arena in which the ruling elites negotiated compromises for the running of the country in their own interests, but it was also the focus of attention for much wider sections of the population, both the franchised and the unenfranchised alike. In terms of the constitutional theory of the eighteenth century, sovereignty lay with the crown-inparliament in which each of the three components of the balanced constitution, King, Lords and Commons, exercised a restraining influence on the others. The monarchy retained considerable powers in this period, powers which were at the centre of the political debate, but increasingly, as the eighteenth century progressed, the balance of power between the two houses of parliament swung in favour of the House of Commons, continuing a process that had begun in 1688. This is not to say that the House of Lords was powerless. Not a few peers were great borough patrons and controlled the votes of many MPs in the Commons. Peers such as the duke of Norfolk, who had interests in eight constituencies, or Earl Fitzwilliam, who had interests in six, could exercise a considerable influence over events in the Commons. The potential for the exercise of such influence actually increased during the first long ministry of William Pitt the Younger (1783–1801) as a consequence of his ennoblement of a number of prominent borough patrons, such as James Lowther, who in 1790 controlled seven seats in four boroughs and was also able to return both county members for Westmorland and one for Cumberland. Moreover, the Lords were not averse to using their status as a revising chamber to exercise a veto over legislation to which they objected. Indeed, the Lords could on occasion be the key factor in bringing down a ministry, sometimes with the connivance of George III, as was the case with the fall of the Fox–North coalition in 1783 or of Pitt’s first ministry in 1801. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the Commons was increasingly the more influential house of parliament and has as a consequence been the primary focus of attention for parliamentary historians. Turning then to the lower house, typically MPs came from Anglican aristocratic or gentry backgrounds and were commonly educated at the public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge. Many, at times up to 20 per cent or more, were the heirs to

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peerages marking time until they succeeded their fathers, or they were the younger sons of nobles who would make their political careers in the Commons (such MPs often sat for seats controlled by their fathers or elder brothers and were the primary channel for the exercise of noble influence in the lower house). None the less, the number of MPs who came from outside the charmed circle of landed society did grow in the late eighteenth century. At the general election of 1761 only around 15 per cent of the 558 MPs came from ‘non-elite’ backgrounds, but this had risen to around 26 per cent (excluding MPs from Ireland) by the general election of 1812. Despite this slight weakening of the hold of the aristocracy and gentry over the House of Commons, however, in this period parliament remained a stronghold of the landed orders, although it should be remembered that many peers and country gentlemen had industrial and commercial interests which gave them a knowledge of affairs outside the confines of the agricultural economy that formed the basis of their wealth and position in society.

The Electoral System In legislative terms the electoral system by which these MPs gained their seats in the Commons remained relatively unchanged in the period 1760–1815. None the less, the campaign for ‘economical reform’ in the late eighteenth century did reduce the scope for ministries to influence the composition of the Commons and the number of placemen declined markedly over this period. Crewe’s Act and Clerke’s Act, both passed in 1782, respectively disenfranchised revenue officers and barred government contractors from having a seat in parliament; although their impact is difficult to quantify, they probably did work as intended and helped to diminish the influence of the executive over the composition and conduct of the legislature. The impact of Crewe’s Act, for example, was felt in those ports which previously had a large proportion of revenue officials among their electorates and who, employed as they were by the crown, may have been inclined to return the crown’s nominees. Curwen’s Act of 1809, which forbade the buying and selling of parliamentary seats, also had an impact on the executive, as Lord Liverpool admitted in 1812, by lessening its ability to return ministerial candidates. The most far-reaching changes to the system of parliamentary representation came, however, as a result of the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800, which added 100 MPs to the Commons, bringing the total to 658, and increased in so doing the number of open constituencies. Beyond these pieces of legislation, the electoral system also underwent a number of important changes in its practice. One reason for this was the growth of the British population, particularly in places that were unrepresented in parliament (such as Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham), which meant that the proportion of voters to the general population became steadily smaller. In the early part of this period the electorate was about 4 per cent of the total population (or less than a fifth of the adult male population). This